At end, life seems a curious exposition of images conjured from dream-state narratives running concurrently on two dozen neural pathways hitchhiking backcountry on currents of snowy breeze.
“None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you — even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.
So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Not a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this:”
(p.508, American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, 2001)In the dream a friend is shot through the right side of torso. I hide behind counter of coffee shop. Earlier, another friend is shot dead on a Mexico beach trying to convince some men not to take his backpack. That, as the perennially confused say, actually happened. Later again, near Pittsburgh, a woman who knew the man in the first dream died of lung cancer in her late forties after many cigarettes and a lot of dancing.
I think of them the way water thinks of icicles as unending stability.
Phenomenology, on the contrary, seeks to show that the everyday world is as self sufficient, and self-intelligible as the objects of theory. It cannot and need not be made intelligible in terms of anything else; rather, it can account for the possibility and place of theory. The world is what we directly understand and in terms of which one can see how nature, equipment, persons, etc. fit together and make sense. Thus worldliness and Dasein’s correlative understanding of being are the proper themes for ontology.
(p.122, Being-in-the-World, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, by Hubert L. Dreyfus, 1991)
Dead? What does that mean?
In the world of dream and imagination it has no particular relevance. In the realm of God death is unaccountably irrelevant. It seems one possible reason many have trouble with God is they believe in death.
Blondel’s style of reading is to read a text through fully, eschewing polemics and taking of reified positions until the doctrines advanced in a text have been adequately understood. Then he proceeds to develop these doctrines or theses to their fullest extent, acting as if they were true in order too see what sort of consequences they would have for the thinking and acting subject. The aim is to assess the adequacy of the doctrines as the representation of a philosophical position, and this consists in two parts. First, there is the question of the adequacy of the representation. Second there is the question of the adequacy of the developed philosophical position itself. The goal of such a reading is to allow a doctrine or philosophical position to provide evidence of its own inadequacy on its own grounds, by indicating to us the extent to which it is true and able to provide an account of itself immanently, and by thereby indicating to us the extent to which it is only relatively true and insufficient, without thereby being simply false.Death is the meditation of unimaginative functionalism.
(-about Maurice Blondel, 1861-1949, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://www.iep.utm.edu/blondel/
Sure, biological functions that sustain a living organism cease.
But energy and matter seem to have a different contemplation in their imagination. We humans seem more constrained in our comprehension.
Consider differently: A pause. A caesura. A comma.
A gassho, a bow, an asperative prayer.
Then, the next thing happens, with or without recognition by that which we like to call “ourselves” -- this carbon-based consciousness.
I would be willing to attest solemnly to this as long as you are willing to consider “Not a word of it is literally true.”
But that it is all true.
