http://mindingwith.blogspot.com/2010/12/monism-andor-dualism-and-incipient.html#comments
I wrote out this reply and it ended up being quite long, so I thought it deserved its own post jst to increase the chances it will be read by anyone other than myself...
It is a dangerous thing to try to escape something in thought. This can change the thought into a thing that haunts; that drives one on a trajectory that arises out of the pursuit of what one flees, and is hence determined by something from behind. Or, the escape could be from not a monster but from a topos--the thought as a prison, and the thinker as the prison break. this is dangerous too, since the thought as prison is like a labyrinth that does not mark its entrance or exit. Even if you've gotten out of the hedges or the high stone walls, how do you not know that you haven't just another chamber in the labyrinth--the labyrinth as city, as field, as desert, as sky. The labyrinth even in love, family, friends. The labyrinth as all.
One could almost say: the labyrinth is as labyrinth does; and a labyrinth is perhaps defined precisely as walls built in such as way as to compel escape, for we can imagine a labyrinth that has all one needs in it, and has all one cares about in it. Can you imagine being in a labyrinth with one's friends and trying to find a way out? One tactic would be: lets all break apart and search separately for the exit. That way at least some of us might get out, and we would increase our chances many fold rather than staying in a single group. This, of course, assumes the labyrinth has an exit, or that it isn't infinite.
Yet, another tactic would be to search together for a clearing in the labyrinth and settle there. Build a place; dwell in the labyrinth. And one could imagine that this clearing, too, could even be infinite, or as long as we're speaking in terms of the mind just as big as one wants it to be. Then it wouldn't so much be in the labyrinth at all, but both would be in each other. It may even be that we are wandering the labyrinth searching for the exit out into the field, when we're already there: maybe the path between the walls of this labyrinth is infinitely wide to dwell in, or the enclosing walls infinitely far away. When we speak of labyrinths of the mind it makes sense to talk this way, assuming it makes sense to talk of labyrinths of the mind.
The final question is of the combination of an imperative to both types of flight at once: the labyrinth and minotaur. Here we can play with infinities again: for, as I think we noted together once, it is perhaps this notion of infinity that is more labyrinth than any labyrinth--while at the same time being the secret of man. What if the minotaur is infinite? If the minotaur is a dimension of psychic existence, he is to that degree quite infinite so far as we're concerned. Infinite bull-headed mouth-god driving into us as in chase, while also taking us in as a devouring? The minotaur as just the principle of motion that impels/compels us in its entrails. A most terrifying idea, that our cherished free will in moving about this labyrinth is actually the flexing push of the walls that press around us in our surroundings, in our organs, even in our cells.
But here is a further mind-bending: what if we, as finite, do not move at all? What if we are, as fixed points, what these innards push off to move,moving around our sight as do the clouds in the sky? Surely if things are infinite, as we've said, then there can be no linear progress in a certain direction towards the entrance or the exit. Hence the scenery of the halls changes around us, rather than us moving through the scenery. Or, at least, it makes the same amount of sense to speak in either way, and truth be told we both move and are moved by virtue of our finitude.
Then an awful truth dawns on us: we are the walls, the minotaur, the labyrinth and we seek an escape from ourselves. And the labyrinth endless captures/devours itself while fleeing into and out of itself. We are, in our flesh and blood, part of the labyrinth. Likewise (and this is an important reversal) the labyrinth is our self-same flesh and blood. I know that you are a connoisseur of our culture's high art, so I need not be embarrassed by introducing the idea of Gomtuu, or the Tin Man (http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tin_Man_(episode) .) We are only in prison insofar as the walls are lifeless and held out against us. But what if they are full of life and mind scarcely such that we could even conceive of it? I tell you, if we could hear a tiny fraction of what these walls feel, we would have a starship. For, as it is written, "So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" and "if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." Yet it is also written: "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing."
This lends a new meaning to the notion of a "spaceship earth." Though, truth be told, we stay only on a single circular path instead of having a warp drive to travel to distant star systems. Perhaps a better term would be "timeship" for we plunge into the warping of the future that is constantly changing the topos of earth, by us in us through us. and we see, on this analogy, just what we are in our own Gomtuu, earth: we are the warp drive through time. We are the bending of time together in order to accelerate the creation of new spaces. Creation is the stationary voyage. It is how we get to new places without leaving home. But the labyrinth is the prison of the earth, and is infinite only by means of a circumnavigation or looping unto itself. There is just such an order today, and it keeps us from the earth that is made to be only beneath our feet.
Regarding the question of everything and nothing, i reply with a bit of dialog from the Japanese interlocutor in Heidegger's A Dialog on Language: "We marvel to this day how the Europeans could lapse into interpreting as nihilistic the nothingness of which you speak in that lecture. To us, emptiness is the loftiest name for what you mean to say with the word 'being.'" This isn't to say that we have represented the "European" perspective, or I am "turning Japanese." Obviously we are all Americans here, though I would stress this in a positive sense as the people who are out of reach of the priests: "The priest did not turn west. He knew in the west there lay a plane of consistency, but he thought it was blocked by the column of Hercules, that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people. but that is where desire was lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions rediscovered or deterritorialized. It was not for nothing that permaculture started in the place where the British empire met, and attempted to swallow, the land of the dream time, and started dreaming dreams of the earth;nor that in those green islands in the expanse of deserts and mountains in the American est it has taken root.
No doubt that in working with the two-fold room must be made for the freedom of the things from the everything, and from nothing, and from love; and they must have a place that gives itself over to this meeting, where things come into their own together. Love gives us this; for love is the word in which to be in love is to be in love with. And, indeed, this love is consummated in the with, without which it would not be there. "for where there are two or three gathered together -- to my name, there am I in the midst of them.'" Love is what you can be in, without being determined by the thing you are in. It gives the things a place to be together as they are, without one consuming or encompassing the other.
"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end."
So far as the twofold, the things circulate from love that gives a place to be as they are--both with as against each other and for themselves, and with as in with each other--and into the totalizing everything-and-nothing. This circulating is the arising and the abeyance, where things come into their own, from out of nothing, and pass back into nothing by the totalizing claim of the all. and love goes into the nothing and finds the things, but it is never fully claimed by the all. even as the all fully encloses it, it comes into its own as the giving site, which the all is drawn into to be--just another thing among things.
This is what gives us confidence that as we travel in the timeship, we hang together as one earth despite the divisions in feeling, where we can even be in the same room with other humans and not know anything of the truth of their feeling. suffering and joy and whole worlds can be together unknowingly in the same place. we are divided but guided by the way; and when we pass through deserts or cold mountains we are not abandoned to them. These divisions clear to a place where they are always meeting;and this victory, though always won out over the death of individuals, will become as a force and a "new sun" for us to travel by.
Nevertheless, I have matured since writing the short post that prompted this matter, and I would not be so hasty to declare "love!"
these are some pertinent videos to think about:
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