(Ir)religiosity

Have you heard anyone articulate a meaningful explanation of the difference of meaning between the words "thought" and "awareness"? If all thoughts are temporal objects outside of the I-I, but enlightenment is an awareness of I AMness, then how is awareness in this sense different from thought? How are we aware of I AMness without -thinking- about it and turning it into a temporal object which then makes it immediately not the absolute subjective?

I haven't heard/read anyone dealing with that per se, but I see what you're getting at. I'll be getting in to Wilber's book soon. Perhaps he delves into that.

If you find out, let me know.

As for the what vs. how conversation, I am at least thankful that even Augustine knew enough not to ask the question as "Who do I love, when I love my G-d?" I have a horrible, sinking suspicion that two millennia of Classical philosophy have created a Church in which far, far too many people think of G-d as a who, not a what, let alone a how. And yes, the question of whether or not G-d exists is to utterly misunderstand that about which you are asking the question. To suggest that G-d does not exist is to speak of something that is not, in fact, G-d or even a god. To suggest that G-d exists, as we understand that word, is to drag G-d down from infinite, boundless, limitless Being into the confines of our space-time universe, and so again, to suggest that G-d exists is to speak of something that is not, in fact, G-d, but merely a god. Kearney/Caputo might say something like "G-d is the agent of possibility through which Existence Is."

I keep thinking about The Greatest Commandment, Deut 6:5 "Love the LORD your G-d with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." (TNIV)

What if there are a pair of commas missing in there? What if it should read like this?

"Love, the LORD your G-d, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."

Now the first commandment is Love. The commandment includes a clarifying reminder that the LORD our G-d Is Love.

Now when you put this in relation to the second great commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself" they become more or less one command, as expressed by the rich young man prior to the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:

"Love, the Lord your G-d, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself."

What becomes interesting about this, is that now the first half is about the complete Love we are called to express, not in relation to any object. We aren't being called to love some object version of G-d. We aren't being called to love other people objects. We are called to Love as completely as we are capable. We are called to do this -first-, and then we are called to relational, object love to our neighbors, second.

This completely displaces Augustine's question, entirely. It is no longer about who do I love, or what do I love, it is how do I love which begs the question "what is love"? But then we start the problem all over again by trying to turn Love into an object.

I fully embrace that Eastern modes of thought (yogis, Buddhists, &c) have a great deal of wisdom and a great deal of The Truth. What concerns me, especially in the wake of my own attempts to parse Taoism, is that I worry that we lack the cultural context to understand these modes of communicative expression. I listen to this video, or to the one you linked yesterday about doing nothing, and I struggle just to parse the language.

But I think that struggle will go a long way towards helping us wrestle our way out from under all this Classical baggage we need to abandon.

What a difference a few commas make! I really like that and I may borrow it from you in the future if that's okay.

There is without a threshold here that many of us cannot cross because we simply like the conceptual framework to understand anything outside the Western canon. Which is a shame.

I don't know that I would want to completely reject the classics wholesale, they are helpful, to be sure. But only to a certain point. I'd love to see philosophy departments broadening their horizons in that respect.

That's one of the reasons why I am so enamored with Caputo and other postmodern religious thinkers. Though they themselves do not explicitly utilize an Eastern framework they are arriving at these same sort of conclusion by using the tradition against itself and completely rethinking what the "self" is altogether. I sometimes wonder if that might be a good entry point for many who are well versed in our Western canon. Not it would stop there, but at least it provides something familiar to work with.