Before I studied philosophy it never occurred to me that experience largely made of language, that world was largely made of language. For me, language is a naked presentation of how we chop experience into objects both concrete and abstract, which implies for me that even concrete objects are only objectified or "framed" by our seeing them as wholes, as unities. This is actually what steered me toward mathematics. I thought that number one, stripped of its contingent glyph and phoneme, was close to the notion of pure being. Pure indeterminate being. And I feel that this unifying faculty of the mind is perhaps a reduction to lowest terms of at least one aspect of thinking, if not the primary aspect.

I was also dazzled by the concept of noumena, but found myself wrestling with its logical awkwardness. And having read something of absolute idealism as the successor to transcendental idealism, it suddenly clicked for me why Fichte and Hegel did away with it. Of course it's still so useful as a pointer to the activeness of our perception, so it's more than respectable in its way. But it's quite sublime, in my opinion, that Hegel could beat Kant's dualism into a sort of monism, and I feel there is a drive toward simplicity, that Occam's razor is an aesthetic principle..

I suppose it's summed up in W's quote: "the limits of my language are the [intellectual] limits of my world." And your mention of filling in the gaps reminds me of all the modules in our human brain, that automatically do this. We are indeed pattern-finders, aren't we? This ties in to my fascination with algorithmic information theory.

Spiritual traditions have tended to look at the world in four major ways: as a battlefield, as a trap, as a lover, and as the self. The first two - as a stage set for our moral battles or as a prison to escape - are probably familiar, and have in many ways contributed to our lack of care for the world. But what of the other two? Might they shed some useful light on life in an interconnected world?

This is the focus of Joanna Macy's wonderful book, World As Lover; World as Self, published by Parallax Press, from which we have taken the following excerpts. Joanna Macy is a scholar of Buddhism and general systems theory. She is known in many countries for her trainings designed to empower creative, sustained social action.

...self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge, and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began - the lonely and heroic journey of the ego.

Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again - and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.

I haven't yet read much of Spengler but am very interested the idea behind the social cycle theory. I have often felt that the evolution of society is a cyclical process. Have you read any of his writings concerning this?

Consider these excerpts from the Buddhist writer, Joanna Macy, who wrote a title called World as Lover, World as Self.

Well it seems you committed that very fallacy by assuming that two aspects of reality being "one" is suggesting that they are identical. Two things can be different and still be part of the same whole. Whenever the One is talked about it is understood always as a whole that is sometimes described about by looking at its parts. But those parts are always one, i.e. they only exist as a whole/one.

Certainly. As I said, X and Y can be members of the same class, Z, without being identical. I am not sure what you have in mind by "an aspect of reality" however. Nor am I sure what the phrase, "exist as" means in this context.

That is important, and I should have been more thoughtful of my wording.

Would it help to say they exist together as a whole?

Unity is therefore the essential word in Truth, but what would be its purpose without the Temporal apartness on the epiphenomena of the World ?

Could One be without this ?

I agree.

Now we are at a time when we are yearning to unite the two somehow, however, no one remembers what it means to be spiritual as it has been lost in the many translations over the past 500 years.

I am not sure. It would depend on whether that implied that they do not "really" exist. To say that dogs and cats "exist as animals" whatever that means, ought not to imply that dogs and cats do not exist. Philosophers like Spinoza and Hegel, and other "holists" do tend in that direction if they are not already there.

Well everything "really" exists in some form or another. The hard part is distinguishing how they exist, or in other words, their essence.

An optimist might find promise in our move toward information. I like the word "geist" which unites the ideas of mind and spirit.

An optimist might find promise in our move toward information. I like the word "geist" which unites the ideas of mind and spirit.

When you are stuck in your own body, and you posses an individual spirit, it is impossible to understand how spirit is a substance which can evolve.

If mind is reduced to observable behavior, then it rips the spirit out of the definition. Thus a distinction is now necessary.