Metaphysical Guidance: what is it? any experiences of it? is it beyond Ethics?

Mutatis mutandis, the above applies to all guides! Am I right? I do hope I am.

I’ll report back if my feelings on the subject charge after reading the whole thing...

It's as if, behind a veil, a whisper suggests, there is some particular business you have in this time and place. Play nice ethics are fine for the mundane business of rubbing along, but perhaps you have a job to do for yourself or for another; creative or healing, for a moment or a lifetime.

It is a dangerous thought if one indulges it. But danger is nothing special either. Is one ever guided to give guidance? By whom? A friend.

If it is so, it will happen whether you chase it or flee from it, because it it comes from within.

Another analogy that I find relatable is, despite the rather flippant and yet grave, approach, the so-called gameplay walkthrough of which you'll find many on youtube - basically offering hints & tips on how to play (the game of life) and win summa cum laude in a manner of speaking.

Some games I hear tend to be open-ended (I hope I got that word right) - there are decision nodes in them and depending on the choices you make, the game ends in one of many different ways. I consider such games to be opportunities as they are 1)a journey of self-discovery [tells you what kinda person you are] and 2) a benign, bloodless, way of assessing one's impact on the world at large [virtual murder/philanthropy/betrayal/empathy or lack thereof, you get the idea].

he had to kill his friend

Guidance seems like a separate thing than Ethics when it comes to choosing our actions and establishing our will / intentions.

Could it be a (temporary) surrender of the Self and Will to some other wisdom, power or energy?

This is referring to a more “interior” or perhaps “metaphysical” definition of Guidance than reading an article or getting advice from a friend.

Your long-running thread about the Tao Te Ching is full of its guidance and inspiration.
I have tried to internalize it so that it helps on a subconscious level, as well as being
rationally helped and directed by it. WWTTD: what would the Tao do?

Very nicely put. Much appreciated!

The Tao Te Ching is the book of the Way, but it's only one way.

There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of ways in the world.

Is that what you mean by guidance? It seems hopelessly broad and vague.

Not for me. I don't understand what Self or Will mean as transcendent entities (if that's why you capitalised them) - to me the self is merely 'who I am' and I leave Will behind with my copy of Schopenhauer

But I can see how people stop thinking when they go off and follow a religious apologist or a dictator. Is that an example of guidance taken to a lobotomised state?

I know of no form of guidance that isn't practical, although it might be indirect and symbolic rather than overt. What do mean by interior or metaphysical?

There's a nice little story by Mervyn Peake, Mr Pye, you might like...

If we are somewhat talking about the same thing, it is not a topic I would normally discuss here in public, because it is necessarily personal and particular and not susceptible to analysis or repeatable experiment.

You seem to be talking about supernatural guidance. While I believe people contrive all kinds of meaning in events they view as signs or portents, I do not have any good reasons to accept magical thinking of this kind. :smile:

But this is a subtle psychological topic, not taking about mathematics or formal logic. :wink:

The Cartesian tradition -- you know the guy, 'I think therefore I am' and coordinate geometry - the foundation of knowledge and science man -- that tradition takes human identity as the certain foundation, the objective atom that is the observer. According to the tradition, it is impossible and unthinkable that my thoughts are not my own, that my mind might be haunted or even possessed by other beings. People who experience themselves as permeable to otherness in these ways are declared to be deluded - because it is impossible.

Still, one can see some curious phenomena playing out in history on various scales that are difficult to explain. There are waves of mass movement of people where what was unthinkable becomes not only thinkable, but doable and completely natural. The enlightenment itself was one such mass movement of mind; the transformation of Germany in the 1930's is another; The hippy movement in the late 60's another. The facts are these; that multitudes change their minds quite radically quite quickly, and yet we want to claim that their thoughts are entirely their own, even the crazies who do not think so.

Play nice ethics are fine for the mundane business of rubbing along

Kusters’ goal is not merely to relate the biographical fact that a careful study of Husserl led to an involuntary hospitalization (as in, “I was studying Husserl one day, and then things got a bit out of hand, and then the ambulance arrived”). Rather, it is to demonstrate to the reader precisely how the study of Husserl’s writings on time can precipitate a psychotic episode.

The problem has to do with Husserl’s reckless use of water metaphors, the most pertinent being the stream. Time consciousness, Husserl tells us, is like a flowing stream, with its facets of retention and protention smuggled into the present moment. But now that Husserl has opened the door to the casual use of water metaphors, what stops us from having a bit of fun, and deploying other metaphors? If we were careful and thorough in this procedure, we would likely alter the temporal structure of experience. Instead of a lazy stream, why not experience time as a raging river, which accelerates and decelerates unpredictably? Or a gentle pond which allows you to move effortlessly in any direction? Or for that matter, a whirlpool, where past and future merge and where one is violently wrenched out of a shared reality? How can anybody read Husserl thoughtfully and carefully and stay sane?

What I mean is that madness itself has a history, as Foucault surmised: it is like a species, or an organism. Its history is internal to it. Madness changes in its inmost character from generation to generation. Any attempt to describe madness is, as a consequence, necessarily partial and incomplete, for it chases after a moving target. And this is as it should be, for this historically mutable character underwrites its oft-remarked elusive nature.

I would pull out a story about a guy going to to the top of the mountain to seek the meaning of life and being told to stop blocking his neighbour's driveway with his car.

We have recourse to mechanical explanations - memes, conditioning, and so on, but mechanical explanations themselves call into question the existence of the unitary observer that constitutes the scientist's viewpoint.

The old fashioned fudge of the psychoanalysts is the divided self, unconscious of its division, but the effect on the observer is the same in the end - the observer cannot be trusted. And so we arrive at postmodernism, often characterised by its detractors as 'anti-science ant anti-truth. And woke.

Play nice ethics are fine for the mundane business of rubbing along
— 0 thru 9

Don't underestimate them. Epiphanies are rare. It's mostly about paying your bills, apologising for errors, letting go of grudges. I would pull out a story about a guy going to to the top of the mountain to seek the meaning of life and being told to stop blocking his neighbour's driveway with his car. But I can't think of one. There are thousands with that message.

Perhaps the whispering guidance we hear and the moral pillars we have are connected, if not two sides of the same coin. The little things in life are important, as you suggest. We search for a light to help us see clearly to take even small steps.

Today we distinguish between a judicial conscience that looks back and a legislative conscience that guides future courses of action; there are a few instances of the latter in the Hebrew Bible. There conscience is not the heart but a voice, a voice that accompanies us. This notion of a voice being with us captures the con of conscience, a word that means “knowing with.” In Is 30:21, we read: “And your ears shall hear a word behind you: ‘This is the way; walk in it,’ when you would turn to the right or the left.” This voice directs our lives. Still, heart also occasionally becomes the guiding conscience that needs to be formed, as in 2 Mc 2:3: “And with other similar words he exhorted them that the law should not depart from their hearts."
https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/examining-conscience (the Jesuit Review.)

[quote=Knowledge]Everyman,
I will go with thee,
and be thy guide,
In thy most need
to go by thy side.

There is something of a movement in psychiatry to regard hearing voices as a natural phenomenon. It is much more common than is generally supposed, because it is hidden by being stigmatised. but people experience something that the scientist will have to characterise as "their thoughts" as coming from elsewhere. But I have argued above that this is a dogma. If there can be one person in a head, why is it impossible for there to be two? Before the scientific dogma became so totalising and dominant as to declare such deviations insane, it was well understood that one would hear voices that might be devilish or angelic, and indeed the voice of conscience was understood by Catholic Christians at least, to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.

What was a guiding voice, knowledge, seems in modern man to have entirely possessed everyman, and insists on pain of incarceration and worse, that possession is a fantasy, and knowledge is all there is to life.