Gvildenu | Mintys / MeilėsUžrašai2003

2003 m. liepos 11 d.

Jenson wrote a letter that got me thinking all day. He wrote:

"I don't want think about the consequences if I were to respond to my wife's "I love you" with, "and I care about you". "But, what about our relationship?", she might respond. "I consider you", would probably not be my best reply at this point."

So, after quite a lot of thought, I responded:

"I'm thinking, in practice, that there are three ways that love works: for your sake, I care, believe, obey. So you have to know the context. If the context is thinking, then I care - that is the practice of love. If I think differently than my wife, and she argues "I love you", and I respond "and I care about you", that may be helpful because it may bring it to the right context. Likewise, in the context of doing, to love is to obey, and in the context of being, to love is to believe. I care for your sake, I believe for your sake, I obey for your sake."

Moreover, now I note something most interesting, this "for your sake". "I love X" means that "for X sake, I love". The "for X sake" may be the scope that gives the context of my love. Love is only practical when it has such a scope, which is to say, when we actually love someone. In that case it seems that we get a trifurcation, a concretization, which makes the love practical - either obeying, or believing, or caring. This is a great idea because it explains how we get from "love" to "love X". Where do we get room for the object of love? We get it when love becomes practical. It is the sake for which we love. And the practical love requires a context: thinking, doing or being.

So this is a big help on relating loving and caring. I share the rest of my letter.

July 12, 2003

My thoughts from yesterday are helping me figure out how "loving" relates to "loving X".

to love:

= to support life
= to support the unity of the representations of anything

(because life = unity of the representations of anything)

= to strengthen the will

(because will = unity of (the representations of anything))

= to heighten willing

(because the representations of anything are the expressions of the will, which is to say, wiling; and the will is the unity of this willing; and the will is stronger if the willing is more pronounced; and it is more pronounced if it is more diverse)

= to heighten "choosing wishing"

(because the ways of willing are given by the ways of choosing to wish, that is, given a scope of not-wishing, we select a scope of wishing)

= to clarify the scopes of wishing and not-wishing

(because we heighten the choosing by making clear the distinction between wishing and not-wishing, through their difference in scopes)

= to wish and not-wish in every way

(because this makes evident all of the scopes of wishing and not-wishing, which are: everything, anything, something, nothing)

= to heighten the distinction between being-one-with and

not-being-one-with. (see Note).

Note: I think wishing and not-wishing across these four scopes are made evident by the eightfold way. So it is likely that this structure helps flesh out the representations of everything, which are given by the kinds of wishing. It seems that we heighten a unity by making pronounced the representations that it unites. God is the unity of representations of everything. I suppose that, if we look for a unity of the not-wishing, then it would be not-being-one-with, and the unity of wishing would be being-one-with (very closely related to God). So to make evident the scopes of wishing and not-wishing, I think would be to heighten the distinction between being-one-with and not-being-one with.

So I think this is a rather nice conclusion: To love is to strengthen the will, which is to distinguish between being-one-with and not-being-one-with so that one might choose.

Yesterday was helpful in thinking, what does it mean to love X? Some of this straightforward, some requires some thought, and I mark with an asterisk (*).

to love X:

= to support the life of X
= *to support the unity by X of the representations of anything
= to strengthen the will of X
= to heighten willing by X
= to heighten "choosing wishing" by X
= to clarify the scopes of wishing and not-wishing for X
= to wish and not-wish in every way for the sake of X
= to heighten for X the distinction between being-one-with and not-being-one-with.

Life is the unity of the representations of anything, and it occurs at that unity, so I think the life of X is given by the unity by X, which I say is through their will, which likewise occurs through that unity. It is interesting here that X inserts itself into the concept "unity of representations" which is "coherence". Life is the coherence of anything. If we speak of the life of X, then that coherence is broken up by X, it is coherence I suppose with regard to X. The life of X is the coherence by way of X of anything. It is as if X offers a scope for life, a localization of that coherence.

Practically, our will is strengthened by God as a reciprocation to our internalization: our obeying, believing or caring.

From yesterday, loving is, in practice, loving X.

loving X = for the sake of X,

in matters of doing, to obey
in matters of being, to believe
in matters of thinking, to care

This should match: for the sake of X, to heighten the distinction between being-one-with and not-being-one-with.

And the latter is given in three different ways by the eightfold way. (There are three different injections which yield frameworks for the languages: argumentation for obeying, verbalization for believing, narration for caring).

This suggests also that the static structures serve as follows:

divisions give the context of doing
criteria give the context of being
topologies give the context of thinking.

Structurally this is all very promising. The eightfold way is a keystone structure, and pretty much generated by this issue of being-one-with and not-being-one-with across the four scopes. So it is great that it might serve as the framework for making sense of love.

What it suggests about love is that is made practical by applying to a scope X, that is, by channeling life through a scope X. In other words, the coherence of anything is channeled through a scope X.

For the sake of X we care about everything, anything, something, nothing. In this way we heighten the scopes that X may choose to wish.

The warmth of caring, and likewise believing and obeying, is in the "for the sake of X".

So the distinction between obeying, believing, caring is given by the three injections of the eightfold way, so I will be able to study that. And the structure of the eightfold way should also clarify the logic of internalizing/will-strengthening with regard to being-one-with/not-being-one-with.

I will be looking closely at the eightfold way, and that will be an opportunity to document it, and perhaps to consider how it relates to Buddha's eightfold way, and draw more from Buddhism. So I will write more what I mean.

As I do all of this I will be looking at the role of that "scope X" as in "for the sake of X" because it lets us have an object for love, as in "loving X". In other words, it opens up a lot of possibility in structure.

July 14, 2003

I hung out with God yesterday, I took a hike through a hill above a nearby spa. I asked him what he might like to investigate, and he pointed out a mistake that I had made, serves me right.

I had written that:

loving is, in practice, loving X.

loving X = for the sake of X,

in matters of doing, to obey
in matters of being, to believe
in matters of thinking, to care

Well, if loving is strengthening the will, then obeying, believing, caring are not loving. For they are simply the internalizations that have God reciprocate by strengthening the will. Loving has to do with God's side of the equation:

resolving the issue of beauty vs. disgust into courage
resolving the issue of love vs. hate into hope
resolving the issue of intimacy vs. fear into honesty

I think the "for your sake" is crucial here, that is where the love enters. God can live without resolution because God makes no mistakes. But we wish for resolution because we make mistakes. God can live on the edge of love vs. hate. But we wish for resolution on behalf of love. This is that recursive stripping away of our decision-making that I wrote about. We want to be brought to that deeper level where we do not err. God likes to open things up, reach out and keep things on the edge.

God strengthens our will by distinguishing for us being-one-with and not-being-one-with. So he makes this distinction by making clear to us which is which at that level where we do not err. This clarification is the "strengthening" that roots, for example, love in hope. We may then, I imagine, be able to love in the way that God loves, reaching out back to heightening the choice.

So the "for your sake" is what roots the issue into your unerring virtue. I love you when I

root your feelings of beauty in your courage
root your feelings of love in your hope
root your feelings of intimacy in your honesty

Here your scope defines your courage, hope, honesty. Your scope defines your unerring depth.

And here I imagine "your feelings" are the shared feelings, simply all feelings. So we can remove the "your". I love you when I

root beauty in your courage
root love in your hope
root intimacy in your honesty.

I love you when you are my touchstone.

You are my touchstone if you are my scope. And if you are my scope, then I internalize with regard to you. So it must be that "for your sake" I obey, believe, care. Because that is what sets you as my scope. And then, as the scope, feelings are rooted in you. And so it is your will that is thereby strengthened. Because all feelings are resolved into your depth.

This is helpful. Thank you, God.

Love is the support of Life. What does this mean?

The activity of the Beginning is to Love. The activity of the End is to be loved. In this sense, the beginning is Love and the end is Life.

Love and Life thus present two completely different perspectives. They are two different RepresentationsOfSlack.

Love is related to Everything as its fullest manifestation.

Note that love and life are at different ends conceptually. They are presumably related by the InversionEffect.

Love is the Unity of the Representations of the Structure of God.
Will is the Unity of the Representations of the Structure of Life.

We might think of love as the weakest manifestation of God. Love is that distillation of God which no longer knows that it is God. And similarly, in the other direction, life is the weakest manifestation of God's will. And life no longer knows that it is God's will.

But also life is the manifestation of will. And perhaps the fullest? From the point of view of Anything (life) and Everything (love) the values may change.

God is one with us by his love which is from beyond us and by which we love one another. We love through God's love and so we are one in God's love. We are one with God and one together and that is through Other by which we are one amongst ourselves as we are beyond ourselves, so that Other and God coincide and all coincide along with them, just as Life and EternalLife coincide.

We love ever deeper:

LoveSelf - Self-understanding - support of Structure
LoveOther - SharedUnderstanding - support of Representations
LoveGod - GoodUnderstanding - support of Unity

God loves the heart. To love and to be loved is very closely related to GoingBeyondOneself. To love is to step forward to coincide with one who is going beyond themselves. Then the one who is loved, when they love, they may turn around so as to step forward - to love - oneself.

This is to allow for a coinciding of views - and a parallel view as with eternal life. Hence understanding is in the turning around, this returning to the beginning. And here that beginning is at the heart. So the movement seems to be: go beyond oneself, coincide with the one who steps forward to meet you, and then turn around to face the one you went beyond.

To love is to be together (to BeOneWith) the one who has separated from themselves, gone beyond themselves.

Going beyond oneself makes for two - the one who was, and the one who went beyond. These two maybe considered together or separate. If one returns back, then it is perhaps possible to consider them separate in a parallel sense. (This is reminiscent of the general relativity paradoxes where one accelerates away and then back).

This separation may be thought of as defining scopes:

Unity: separated from oneself by Nothing
Representation: separated from oneself by Something
Structure: separated from oneself by Anything
Spirit: separated from oneself by Everything

How does this relate to BeingOneWith?

WhatYouFindIsWhatYouLove - this is the fact that there is one love and so God's love for us (through what we find) and our love is the same love

===Thoughts===

Relate love to Understanding.

According to Plato's The Feast, love is the seeking of eternal good. And it's activity is the giving birth to beauty. I add that beauty is what fosters sensitivity, and thereby supports life. We love a person - that is the way of our love - as we know how to support ourselves, and so we are able to support a person. We are one with everybody, anybody, somebody, nobody - and there are related emotions of content, excitement, surprise and sadness - and in this way our love becomes more focused, more concentrated - first infantilic love of self as everything, then an empathy for others, then an idealization of the one (the somebody) who is most exalted and encompasses all, and then the disappointment that we have for this world, yet we are able to focus our love on nobody - and so disappointment is the highest form of love, in that it has us recognize a greater world as necessary - as Christ says, we must hate our life in this world. And the fact that disappointment is the highest form of love is very helpful because it lets us respect family troubles and tensions between husband and wife, or parents and children. Also, each level raises the question - who are we serving, ourselves or another? Are we loving ourselves or loving another? And love expresses the relation between Subject (Observer) and Object (Observed), that there can be something more than the Observer. And as we realize subjectively that there is something greater than us, then we can go out into the world ever more objectively and love from that basis, so that we finally find the contentment of eternal life.

I am making a bit more progress, in particular, in understanding love.

In this sense, given that the representations of everything are:

everything wishes for nothing
everything wishes for something
everything wishes for anything
everything wishes for everything

we have that Love is the unity of these representations.

I suppose that we have that:

Love is the unity of "the representations of everything"
God is the unity of the representations of everything
and in this sense God is Love.

Just as:

Will is the unity of "the representations of anything"
Life is the unity of the representations of anything.
and in this sense Life is Will.

This way of looking at Love is nice because it makes clear that Love is built-in through everything as the framework that supports life. And that in this sense God is Love as that same unity, just more completely transparent. It makes intimate the support of everything for anything.

2003.06.06 Today I had a thought which I imagine is in the spirit of Unology.

I was reaching for the big picture, so I was thinking about the commands LoveGod and LoveYourNeighborAsYourself.

I thought how loving our neighbor is being one with them. And that I think of loving our neighbor as "identity" and loving God as "perfection" (and Jesus as being the bridge between these two very different concepts). I remembered how Jesus, in his prayer in the Gospel of John, spoke of "love" as "being one with", especially with regard to God. (I include a quote below).

I also wondered, what does neighbor mean? And what does it mean for God to love his neighbor as himself? I think of God as creating everything by some how folding it all up so that it has a geometry where things can happen. And, in this way, beings of his nature arise who do not know they are such, but have to figure it out and go beyond the struture they find themselves in and look beyond it for that which they are one with. These beings are bounded, and start out disconnected, but otherwise they are of God, open. And these are the beings close to God, near to him, his neighbors.

So I asked God, how does he love his neighbor, and the answer I think I got was that he resurrects him and gives him eternal life. I think of God as creating us, but also that process broken down into parts, placing us, awakening us, having us reach out to each other, to him. (And ourselves participating in such a process.)

I looked for what "Love God" and "Love your neighbor as yourself" have in common, and what they have different. In common I think they have this Unity for Empathy, this BeingOneWith.

The difference is that one is global, and the other is local. "Love God" is empathy for a global unity. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is empathy for a local unity. This local unity is very practical. It is perhaps ultimately the same. It may perhaps overcome all of the barriers. It is a recognition of the geometry that we find ourselves within, and an overcoming of it. I think it doesnt require a concern for the global unity, either.

It also points to the role of Slack (and good is slack, that is, good is the unity of the representations of slack). Slack is what allows local unity, the overcoming of the local geometry.

And "who is our neighbor?" Jesus was asked this, and in reply, he spoke of the Good Samaritan, the one who crossed the road to help the victim in the ditch, and care for him, and bring him to safety, and be responsible for him. It is a little strange that, at the end, Jesus asks, Who was the neighbor to the victim? Not the passersby, but the one who showed mercy, the one who drew closer, who gave slack. It means that Samaritan is the neighbor to the victim! which, taken literally, (and who takes Jesus literally!?) is that "Love your neighbor" means "Love the Samaritan" (not the victim). In other words, you know who your neighbor is - it is the one with slack to reach you, the one who overcomes barriers. If anybody is able to reach you with their slack, then likewise, you should be one with them. That is local unity. (The kind that, as Jesus says, even the pagans have, they know how to love those who love them.) Whereas, if you want to love your enemy, then that is global unity. But local unity, taken seriously, yields global unity.

This distinction between Loving locally and Loving globally is helpful structurally. It points to the importance of geometry (space and time) to God. (This comes up in the distinction between God and humans, everything and anything, as unbounded and bounded.) So I remembered the Operation [AddThree +3] (an addition of three levels of reflection) which I think is Consciousness. Here are the issues defined by the divisions of everything, and taken up by their perspectives:

nullsome => God
onesome => order
twosome => existence
threesome => engagement (particpation)
foursome => knowledge
fivesome => decision (continuum, time/space)
sixsome => morality (structure)
sevensome => good (truth, anti-structure = freestanding opposite)

The eightsome collapses into the nullsome (just as "all are white & all are black" collapses into an empty system"). I think there is some kind of operation +3 on these divisions that relates to consciousness so that:

engagement is consciousness of God
knowledge is consciousness of order
decision (time/space) is consciousness of existence
morality is consciousness of engagement
good is consciousness of knowledge
God is consciousness of decision (time/space)
order is consciousness of morality
existence is consciousness of good

I think that these operations happen by means of the unity of the representations of the division that is operated on. For example, in the "Critique of Pure Reason", Immanuel Kant writes about his Transcendental Deduction. I think, in the end, he did not quite have it all together, and he kind of fudged it, these things are so murky. So here is my version. If you start with the division of everything into two perspectives (opposites coexist, all things are the same) and you take the "how" level representation (outside, inside) then you have that outside leads to inside. (If I am outside of a system, we are opposite, but if I get sucked into it, then it is like being inside the universe, there is no outside, and there is no way out.) So this is an algorithmic expression of the twosome. Think of it as a machine. It can be on or off. The relationship of these two machines is that of theory (machine off) and practice (machine on). When the machine is off, then I am distinct from it, opposite to it. But when the machine is on, then I am living through it, like a carrot through a grinder, or water through a pipe, we are one and the same process. As perspectives, theory gives way to practice. Well, the machine relates (outside and inside) as cause and effect. In theory, every effect has had its cause. But in practice, not every cause has had its effect. And there is the connection between the two machines, their inflection point. (The present). I need to think more about this, but my point is that this kind of argument shows the relationship between the twosome and the fivesome, and here it is one of adding three levels of reflection, but also one of consciousness, which means here that we are conscious of existence in that we are thinking of existence as an algorithm that we are able to turn on or off. Perhaps in space/time this means that we can control the scope of existence, the boundary between inside and outside, and in this way we are conceptually in control of existence, and as such conscious of it.

Here consciousness is "conceptually in control" where I think the "conceptually" is +1 levels of reflection and "in control" is +2 levels and we have x +3 = x +2 +1 This works for the lower divisions because they have such representations (four of them: whether +0, what +1, how +2, why +1) and it is simply a matter of adding perspectives.

However, in the case of the larger divisions, we need to end up with fewer perspectives! We need slack, anti-structure. These divisions have only two representations. I think what happens is that we use these two representations, and appeal to the fact that we are working with ALL of the representations.

For example, time and space are the two representations of the division of everything into five perspectives. Well, God (or me, or everything) is very akin to the unity of time and space.

I will be thinking about the following connections:

-1 = 4 + 3 truth - unity of perspective and situation
0 = 5 + 3 God - unity of time and space
1 = 6 + 3 order - unity of emotion (Gods perspective) and cognition (mans perspective)
2 = -1 + 3 existence - unity of increasing slack and decreasing slack

These equations seem intimately related to the primary structures (for transcendence), namely

6 = 3 + 3 operating principles
7 = 4 + 3 counterquestions
8 = 5 + 3 emotional responses
9 = 6 + 3 internalization, eightfoldway

Most of this work on +3 I did during and after my trip to Lithuania back in 1988-1989. I noticed that a similar "unity of representations" has become very important concept in my work of the last few years. It lets me distinguish between spirit and structure, as in:

God is the unity of representations of everything
good is the unity of representations of slack
life is the unity of representations of anything

So I will explore what this means in the above context, and try to make more sense of this operation +3.

Note: Just as the mind can be known by running up against the limits of imagination and transcending them, so the heart can be fulfilled by loving more than one believes possible.

Mylėti Dievą

This is very much related to LoveYourEnemy. In order to both have an enemy and love them, we need to be able to have a split mind, as is the case when we love God. For this reason a good atheist is not able to have enemies (or acknowledge them as such).

Love God is also directly associated with being Perfect, with behaving the same towards all, both the good and the bad.

To love X is to support X so that it is alive, sensitive, responsive.

We love God by allowing God to live through us, by following the will of God.

There are three means by which we may follow the will of God (go on his way):

We Obey - we go because we are told.
We Believe - we follow the one who goes down the road.
We Care - we care to get to the end of the road.

Mylėti artimą: šeši pavyzdžiai

This means to love those who are good to us (as was the Good Samaritan).

With regard to the "big picture" of our laboratory, I am looking for a foundation for six of our objectives: thinking about our own thoughts, actions, stands, and other thoughts, actions, stands. My feeling is that they can be derived from the commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself". I think that they offer different aspects of what it can mean to be a neighbor. Here are some examples of the kind of logic that helps me think of others as my neighbors.