Monist Metaphysics

I always felt this dissatisfaction with the erotic, particularly by how it is expressed in our culture.
Not only too much emphasis was given to it, but its experience as I later discovered, did not warrant it.
Later I could not explain why Freud focused so much on the erotic element when death was right there, underneath it all, pushing it all forward, or rather, forcing these reactions to its coming.
Sloterdijk filled in some gaps for me.
It is not accidental, that Freud was Jewish no more than it is accidental that Jews dominate, proportionally, the Hollywood entertainment industry, marketing/politics, in the states, and pornography.

Plato hinted that the philosopher should not state the truth openly to all; that some noble lies must be preserved amongst the young.
He places it on Socrates, and how while campaigning in war he came across a Thracian teaching which he then brought back, showing regret about his earlier seduction of the Athenian youths.

It is why Nietzsche spoke over the heads of those who would inevitably misunderstand him.

Strauss, another Jew, sensing the effect, warned by exposing the hidden message...this reading between the lines which he was then absolved of doing himself.
Liberal Democracy becomes the necessary lie.
But the secret permeates, as internal fissures are creating pooling amongst the more aware.
Given the times, and how quantity is being used, one must adopt this writing between the lines, or this Oracle, Biblical style.

It's best to be misunderstood by the many rather than to be understood by them.

My own mistake has been this desire to reveal to those who would most despise me for it.
Not that I would say anything novel, for ideas are old, but that I would dare to speak them openly to those who would resent me for it.
This is an attack on identity, on the necessary survival ideas the majority need to remain sane and in-line.

Nietzsche attracted the fanatics, as Jesus did. It is unavoidable that when speaking indirectly those who most need will grasp upon any hint to feed on.

This is why I speak of a paradigm shift.
Appearances are minimized, senses reduced to a joke, sex is made into a choice, a product for consuming, technology, technique, is raised to the level of a new Messiah, a secular God, with prophets such as Jobs worshiped even after death.

If so, how liberating.

The paradigm shift, this memetic conflict and identification, involves a change in associations.
Not in relation to nature, the past, because that's the practice of the modern nihilists, those positive ones, who sell liberation from reality, from nature, as the new salvation code.
No, this would be a liberation from those who insist on not being judged on appearances or on their sex.

The premise of humanity rests on a sexual identification, and that's the funny part.

Sloterdijk lays out the moment when the historic Turn from Plato to Xt. occurred...

Quote :

"This movement, which is not only retreat but also turning, was first accounted for in the ancient occidental tradition by Plato. In his account, the critical movement initially appears as a purely cognitive act meant to lead from the corrupt sensible world to the incorruptible world of the spirit. To carry it out, a change of sight from the dark to the light is required, a change that cannot take place 'without turning the whole body' (holo to somati). This marks the first explicit reference to the motif of the integral turn. Analogously, the same faculty must 'be wheeled round, in company with the entire soul' (h6le te psyche), from seeing to becoming, until one has learned to pay attention only to the eternally existent, and to prefer and endure the brightest part (phan6taton) thereof: the sun of good. Needless to say, the 'turned' soul takes the whole human being with it in its subtle movement. This redirection of sight and existence must not occur by chance and merely once, however, but be developed into a veritable 'art of turning around' (techne periagoges), or an asceticism of complete existential reversal. This is based on the assumption that those to be turned have their full cognitive apparatus, but that this is initially and mostly 'turned in a wrong direction' due to an age-old bad posture. The philosopher knows about this from his own experi­ ence, for he has discovered the cave's exit. He understands what it means to have turned himself around and ventured outside. What he has achieved should not, he feels, be impossible for his fellow humans. Never is he, the first orthopaedist of the spirit, more gener­ ous and more of a stranger to the world than when, as here, he pro­ jects his own character onto others."

Quote :

"There were good reasons for the timing of the individualistic retreat from Plato's over-enthusiasm, from this excess of missionary zeal that denizens of the Modern Age would term 'utopian'. The doctrine of periagoge, the turning around of the soul (which was later often combined with the term epistrophe), was in fact the first explicit version of the absolute imperative 'You must change your life!', framed in the exhortation to turn one's entire being towards the spir­itual side. This imperative was first formulated in a holistic variation that led to numerous severe misunderstandings. In its deep structure, the Platonic doctrine of learning by the sun of truth had remained an occulted sacrificial theory - related in this respect to the ascetic systems appearing in Asia at the same time - as the turning around of the soul could ultimately only be defined as a relinquishment of the particular in favour of the general. The consequence was that this version of the absolute imperative was affected by two profoundly misconstruable factors. The first was the verb, in that 'change' here meant something along the lines of 'sacrifice oneself to the general', and the second lay in the possessive pronoun, in that the adepts were secretly dispossessed of 'their' lives, which were instead handed over to the true whole that was yet to be created. You are in the world for the sake of the whole, not vice versa - this is the correspond­ ing admonition in Plato's Nomoi. 'We do not belong to ourselves', we are still told today in traditions of this type. This is the origin of anthropotechnic tendencies that pervert the absolute imperative by reading 'life' instead of 'your life' - though here, on the terrain of antiquity, the word 'life' admittedly has more political than bioscien­tific implications. Compared to this, the apolitical spiritual systems of late antiquity were absolutely right to insist that individuals should be taken seriously as individuals. Only for that reason had they been concerned to initiate them into the craft of life, concern for oneself, lege artis. Like an ancient anticipation of the modern restriction of the right to arrest (the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act of 1679), they undo the individual's helplessness before the whole and assert its inalienable claim to a self-determined life, even if, as prisoners of reality, they are forced to accept certain curtailments of their right to freedom.
It would take a millennium and a half until the holistic coup of the Christian post-Christian Neoplatonist Hegel and his materialistic followers put the idea of universal conversion back on the agenda of modernity, with the known consequences - predominantly bloody consequences that, taken as a whole, go back to the amalgamation of the Graeco-Germanic philosophy of liberation and the ideas of the French Revolution."

Quote :

"In the meantime, the motif of reversal - which had initially been primarily the domain of political theory and the philosophical an of living - had been monopolized by religious interpretations. Their paradigm was the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, com­ mented upon countless times. There are two accounts of this defining moment in the Acts of the Apostles: once in autobiographical form as part of Paul's defence speech before the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 22), and once in the third person (Acts 9). Both versions emphasize that Paul was 'turned around' through the event on the road to Damascus, transformed from a persecutor of Christians to an envoy of Christianity. In the personalized version, the story is as follows:

'About noon as 1 came near Damascus, suddenly a bright light from heaven flashed around me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me, "Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?"

'''Who are you, Lord?" I asked.

'''1 amJesus ofNazareth, whom you are persecuting, " he replied. My companions saw the light, but they did not understand the voice of him who was speaking to me.

'''What shall I do, Lord?" I asked.

'''Get up," the Lord said, "and go into Damascus. There you will be told all that you have been assigned to do.'" (Acts 22:6-10)

The third-person account of the same events, which is located near the beginning of the acta apostolorum, contains only one substantial variation: it emphasizes that the companions stood by speechless because they heard the voice, but saw no one (Acts 9:7).

Considering this tale, one thing is clear: even here, we are already light years away from the sublime Platonic reflections on the turning of the soul and its guidance from the cave of collective sensory illu­ sions. There is no reference to the concerns of Greek rationalism or the turn towards the sun of truth. The light that dazzles the zealot on the road to Damascus is a mixture of midday demon and hallucina­ tion. The story is already set firmly on the terrain of a magical concep­ tion of the world (Spengler even assigned it to the atmospheric space of the 'Arabian' cultural soul) whose mood is defined by apocalyptic expectation, salvation panic and a miracle-hungry supra-naturalistic hermeneutics. Most of all, it displays the spirit of a zealotry that is ready to leave for any destination, and which barely seems to care whether it heats up in one direction or another. Placed against the background of the philosophical concept of conversio or epistrophe, Paul's experience is by no means a conversion, which would have completely changed his personal habitus. Nor was it for a moment a realization, but rather the encounter with a divine voice that has no qualms about manifesting itself in this world. Taken as a whole, what happened to Paul is no more than the 'reprogramming' of a zealot in the precise sense of the world. The term is justified because the 'oper­ ating system' of Paul's personality could continue to be used more or less unchanged after the reversal, but now freed up for an extraordi­ nary theological creativity.

The conversion of Paul therefore belongs in an entirely different category of 'turnings' that display an apostolic-zealotic character, not an ethical-'revolutionary' one. The theological tradition provides the term metanoia for this, whose general tendency is best formulated as 'change of heart', with 'penitence' as the heightened Christian form. From a psychodynamic perspective, the term belongs in the force field of the inner collection that seems appropriate before or after great events - whether after a personal or political defeat that forces a re-evaluation of one's decorum, one's guiding maxims in life, or in anticipation of an imminent event that is apocalyptically foreshadowed. Metanoia is above all a panic phenomenon, in that it goes hand in hand with the gesture of pulling oneself together in a crisis and getting serious before the looming end. It is no coincidence that the era of the European Reformation, which was swarming with people who wanted to get serious, was another heyday of the dark belief in astral influence and the fear of end times. The modus oper­ andi of metanoia is not the turning around of the personality, but rather the collection and heeding of the long-known, which, for lack of an immediate occasion, one had previously avoided examining in full depth. This applies especially to Paul, who, while pursuing the Jewish dissidents who had joined the Jesuan sect, would have had ample opportunity to understand that they essentially had the more coherent interpretation of the tradition already, and that they were the ones who had given the messianic element of Jewish doctrine the most exciting of all possible readings.

What Paul experienced on the road to Damascus, then, was a meta­ noetic episode that led to a reorganization of consciousness from the perspective of a newly formed centre of the highest conviction. This constitutes a process that William James, in the chapters devoted to 'conversions' in his classic Gifford Lectures of 1901 ('the Varieties of Religious Experience'), sought to interpret using a suggestive general schema: in the subliminal consciousness of the subject, a new epicen­ tric personality core prepares itself and merges with the hot spot of operative self-awareness at an opportune moment, bringing about an intense transformative experience. The application of this model to the case of Paul immediately yields a consistent picture; in practice­ theoretical terms, he had already 'trained with the opponent' for some time. His exercises in hostility towards the Jesuans had put him in suf­ ficient form to cross over to the position of his previous adversary at the right moment. He had long formed a clear, albeit still unwelcome idea of this adversary's strengths on the pre-conscious level. In this context, it seems significant that in the 'autobiographical' version of the scene on the road to Damascus, he already addresses the speaker who calls him from above as 'Lord' (kyrie), even before he has identi­ fied himself as the Jesus he had been persecuting. Everything would suggest that his second person was waiting for this interjection.

From this point of view, Paul was not a convert, let alone a 'revo­lutionary', as is claimed in recent neo-Jacobin interpretations of the Pauline phenomenon, but rather an opportunist - in the sense of Machiavelli's theory of opportunity - who, in spite of himself, had long since recognized the high spiritual chances of the new doctrine he had initially fought. He had understood, at first intuitively and later explicitly, that only a messiah who genuinely came could help the politically hopeless and intellectually stagnating Judaism of his time to escape from its rut. Naturally he had never remotely intended to found or set in motion 'universalism', or even a subjective varia­ tion thereof; he simply applied himself to reformatting an elect group (much like the professional revolutionary of the Leninist cast, who were always more elitist exterminists than inclusion-friendly univer­ salists, and like the no-longer-numerous successors of Robespierre in France). It is characteristic of 'conversions' of this type that they occur more in the mode of yielding to an already pre-consciously recognized self-evidence than of adopting a completely new doctrine - James quotes extensively from the accounts of heavy drinkers who, through a form of religious self-collection (usually in a Protestant environment with strong conversion stereotypes), had managed to ally themselves with their existing, but previously powerless better judgement and thus distance themselves from their addiction."[You Must Change Your Life]

The Trinity may have something to do with how the human brain relates to others.

We've heard of the Dunbar limit of 150-180 relationships being the limit of how many relationships the human brain can maintain....but Dunbar suggests that this number is reached ion threes.

Father (absolute, noumenon, mind), Son (flux, phenomenon, body), and Holy Spirit (relationship, reference, neurological system).
Negative/Positive, and Whole.
Subjective/Objective and Being.

The third being part of both in the dualistic paradigm and yet other than, in an ambiguous sense.

Metaphysics, in relation to physics, is a reflection of mind in relation to body, occurring in the nervous system and expressed linguistically (semiology): noumenon in relation to phenomenon.

Metaphysics exceeds the boundaries of experienced space/time - like infra-red and ultraviolet exceed the boundaries of the light spectrum, where man's senses are effective.

This exceeding can result in excess, i.e. decadence.
The degree to which the metaphysical description contradicts and/or challenges the physical, determines the degree to which it has exceeded a description of the cosmos (objectivity), and has entered a description of the mind's reaction, or relationship with the cosmos (subjectivity); noetically (theoretically) exited the realm of experienced existence (world) and entered the realm of reactive, relating to experienced existence (psychology and all its by-products, i.e., politics, spirituality etc.)
In other words, using philosophical linguistic artistry, we may say that we've abandoned realism and adopted surrealism to compensate for a lack of artistic talent, or to reject and replace the real world with one's own creative reactions to the real world - exposing, in the process, the psychological underpinnings of this reaction, revealing a relationship of subjective mind with objective world.
Such abstractive methods are effective, in the short-term, producing psychological turmoil n the midst of populations suffering from existential anxieties, quantitatively multiplied by sheltering, increasing the numbers of those who intuitively know they cannot endure nor cope with reality, unless some compensating and escapist alternative is offered - popularity of modern art - i.e., fArt - is explained as a brewing existential crisis, seeking relief in usurping the experienced real with the alternative surreal.
A by-product of cultural decline, leading to a gradual and/or sudden implosion - a "reality check".
The "gods" can be dismissed and even forgotten but they cannot be denied. In the end nature returns back to where the human intervened.

Metaphysics is to the mind what physics is to the body – physis {φύση} the Greek word for ‘nature’. [ MANifesto: Nihilism][ MANifesto: Language]
The relationship of metaphysis to physis – the noetic to the phenomenal, the experience, reaction, to the present, apparent – indicates the relationship of mind to the body it emerges from. For this reason we find that in nihilism’s defensive projections an attempt to ‘correct’ or to ‘usurp’ the experience of world with a mental construct that only exists in the mind, as a reaction and a relationship with it. Semiotics, i.e., language, become the only tangible externalization of its presence in the mind – for this reason nihilistic spiritualties – called religions – begin with semiotics, viz., semiotics found in sacred texts they pronounce divine because they claim to describe what precedes presence – existence. The relationship of physis to metaphysis is inverted from metaphysics proceeding from physics, to preceding physics. This slight, but crucial, modification enables the mind to place its guiding principles in a ‘beyond’ or a hidden ‘below’ the experienced, requiring only a utility, self-consistency and a psychological motive (psychology being the discipline dealing with mind/body relationships and balances) – which is always present, though sometimes hidden within it; it is the motive which is ‘beyond’ or hidden ‘beneath’ the language. Physis, the physical world, is either selectively or completely dismissed, if it cannot serve to support its metaphysis.
The difference between spirituality and philosophy is this angle of approach, from metaphysics towards physics, in the former, or from physics to metaphysics in the latter – a difference of a priest from a philosopher, and of Abrahamic from Pagan spiritual world-views: essentially religion to spirituality.
Metaphysics properly applied acts as a support for the experienced physical, and proceeds from it, offering a vision into what precedes from it – adequately represented by the term ‘meta’ {μετά}. Its proper role is to connect that of the mind with that of the body – noumena with phenomena – but it often acts as a mental pivot to invert and/or entirely reject the phenomenal (apparent) or what is present, when it proves to be too problematic to the mind; acting as a psychological reaction to a clear & present danger.

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The only way the concept of a singularity cane exist is as a vague abstraction, given a symbol to externalize its esoteric obscurity.
Obscurity is how it maintains itself in relation to a contrary experience of the real; how it evades its inconsistencies and lack of external references.

For example, the concept of a universe - a one, whole, completeness, i.e., singularity - is only possible by assuming an external vantage point - a beyondness.
From this presumed point of reference the 'entirety' of what exists can be obscurely conceived as an absolute whole, whereas from within experience no such concept can be validated, except, again, by using the mind's god-like utility to cut away dimensions and to focus upon a noetically enclosed space/time, converted to an abstraction and then given a representative symbol.
Given fluctuating existence the symbol/word can never refer to the same phenomenon, though noetically it appears to remain static.
Like the Heraclitean linguistic paradox of 'stepping into the same river twice'.
Like all paradoxes it exposes the dissonance between mind/body or the ideal and the real - pronounced into a psychosomatic schisms - schizophrenia or neurosis - when the ideal takes precedence over the real.