Title: Intentional Being
- Free will within a collaborative broad cultural art.

hi all (I admit, this post is too long. I hope its not too disruptive.)
Posted: http://www.opensourcejudaism.com/forum Nov 26, 2004

David_Friedman wrote:
Calling two things by the same name doesn't make them the same thing. This is what I was objecting to.

Our forum topic headings are theology and fundamentals. A successful study and conversation, about how we think and how we use words to think and to communicate, requires a shared broad cultural language and art (which includes ritual expression, tradition and convention). It is as participants of shared broad cultural art that we can experimentally grasp and explore the shared cultural material we are attempting to comprehend and communicate. If we don't share broad cultural art, including word, we won't be able to communicate using conventional language, for example, English, science and religion.

It seems to me that theology, within a wider cultural conversation, is the specialized study of the observations and interpretations of personal experience, considering the limitations of the human experience, specifically in the range of communicating conceptual abstractions. Theological fundamentals could perhaps refer to the most inclusive and conclusive categories of theological convention. Theology then, refers to communicating the human experience abstracted, to the most extended degree. Theology, specializes in the abstraction of all human experience. Whereas mysticism refers to the extreme realization and embodiment of human experience. Both GOD methods relate to the whole of human experience. Each of the extreme GOD relating methods requires an integral perspective of the other method, if to be integral to the whole of human experience. I am always impressed by people who can culturally communicate an integrated perspective, and all the more so if bridging the extremes with a middle path, a golden mean.

To communicate and think with abstract words and art is to transfer our experience. We refer to our experiential connective nodal intersections, to our hub like summary but transitory conclusions within our complex weblike associative process highways. All of which always relate to the human experience, each person, a driver, a vehicle, a path finder, a collaborative road and city maker. We co-develop our cultural language and art in amazingly complex nested structures that communicate possibly familiar and possibly congruent human experiences. Words and art are landmark sign posts to instruct and orientate us to navigate the associative process highways. Words and art refer to relations, to time orientations, personal, collective, circumstantial, non-apparent circumstance. Communication carries instruction, it carries the type of psychological orientation we are suggesting. Words and art in their context carry metadata referring to a measure of abstractness or concreteness, complexity, simplicity, quality, quantity, relational proximity we are attempting to communicate.

An example of the relative use of words is the grammatical first person (I, me, myself). When a person says, "myself", we understand the words usage, the verbal act of referring to the verbal actor. It is an experience familiar yet very unique to each of us. We have learnt to assimilate the word to refer to ourself and to infer its meaning by another. When we talk of affection and love, we understand that we are referring to some aspect of the familiar, an embodied, expansive yet intimate human experience. Yet the words "self" and "love" are not easily grasped in our communication.

What do we mean when we refer to the Divine? Do we refer to our experience of the Divine? What do we mean when we say worship? Does "worship" refer to a certain range of experiences or certain states of being? Are we attempting to communicate a subject that spans complex nesting logic; theological, anthropological, sociological, psychological, physiological, biological, ecological, geological, cosmological?

The inspirational Biblical character Moshe, in his encounter with Divine Vocation, asks,
"To proclaim intentional being among slaves and slave masters, What shall I say is your name?"

"I will be with you. Know this when you return here free to worship together. Say to them, I intend being whatever I intend to be."

Moshe then tells us, "He whom intends being" will free our being and we will worship this being.

So we began a journey, to return to an orientation of Divine Vocation, to worship together. Moshe ascends in to the midst of our gathering, calling for us to follow. We fear the midst of collaborative intentional being, lest we not maintain our familiar personal conscientious selves within collaborative conscious being. From this awesome place of our intentional being, Moshe learns to instruct us, to guide us to provide ourselves with a common cultural artwork and words, in the manner of the intentions of this Free Being. "I am Intentional Being, The Entire Concert of your Every Influence, the one whom has taken you out from the terrain of narrow straits, from the institution of exploitive devotion."

David_Friedman wrote:
The "light that gives of itself and is not thereby diminished" is no more than a poetic image which has nothing to do with science. Any source giving off energy (in the form of light) must eventually become depleted, whether a candle or a star.

Stars and candles may also receive more energy, more fuel to burn, to shine and give out. Eventually, stars and candles may become the fuel of greater lights. How much more so human freedom, learning and compassion? Halelu Yah!

Yehoshanah

2004 11 26

Your visit adds one for the site: and adds one for this page: