Thinking Being Reading Groups
All 4 discussions of Thinking Being by Eric Perl.
Episode 1 - Plato
Episode 2 - Aristotle
Episode 3 - Plotinus
Episode 4 - Thomas Aquinas
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Episode 1 - Plato
Episode 2 - Aristotle
Episode 3 - Plotinus
Episode 4 - Thomas Aquinas
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Very well put by one of the people there: "Our being is the being of Being, and not just our own peculiar being; we don't have a private being, is one way of putting it."
Kind of really the nub of it - thinking (in the current year) of things like Keith's and Morgoth's reflections on the flaws of liberal individualism, this is where all that comes from, the idea of being something distinct and separate from the Big Yin, something that has its own ultimate freedom, is where it all starts to come apart. One thinks of the idea of trying to "hide" in the Garden of Eden. Or the entire empiricist project of reducing experience to private impressions (which then are SOMEHOW - though we can never quite figure out how - representations of a reality outside them). Or the idea of Protestantism and sola scriptura (with everyone interpreting the Jewish text - which most of the West had forgotten about up to that point :) - personally, which is not necessarily such a bad thing, but it could - and obviously did - go terribly wrong, into an efflorescence of "heresies" that continues to this day).
Or as the non-dual Sufi Ibn Arabi said, "If you think that to know Allah depends on your ridding yourself of yourself, then you are guilty of attributing partners to Him – the only unforgivable sin because you are claiming that there is another existence besides Him, the All-Existent: that there is you and a He."
It SEEMS like the idea of being ever so 'umble, just this poor little me in the corner (don't mind me), is like a good thing, like a self-effacing humility, but actually it's not, it's "attributing partners," and eventually that sense of ego will expand into a monster (quite as de Sade predicted, but liked the idea of :) ).