monart

“Existence exists, we live.” "The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Based on my understanding of this, I would make this series of propositions: Existence exists. Existence is identity. Consciousness is conscious. Consciousness is identification. Consciousness is alive. Some existents live. I live. Others live. We live.

How are you understanding Advanta Vedanta such that it appeals to you? It posits a dualistic reality of an illusionary phenomenal self/world and a true ultimate self/world, doesn't it?

My grasp of the integrated mind-body improvement of one's health and the self-realization of one's purpose through rational, productive living in consonance with objective reality, is satisfying and sufficient to link my self to Existence. In your quest, what in Vedic philosophies attracts you?

So, you explain that "Existence is Identity", and "Consciousness is Identification" are not exactly condensed re-statements of “...something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists”? I understood it as being such, since Rand, a few paragraphs later, writes, "...the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification." You explain why this isn't a re-statement, but a more derivative inference. I'll continue to reflect on that.

It's possible, today in the US-C of A, to live healthily to a hundred or more. I, myself, have a healthy-hundred as my goal. At 74, I'm as fit mentally and physically, overall, as the usual 64 or younger (even with the poor start of my malnourished childhood in the poverty of Maoist China). Whatever one's age or condition, one could live more healthily and longer. See "The Five Doctors" and the Comment following it. The key to a healthy self and a longer life is to be healthy every day in every way for the rest of your life. A healthy self is integral to the continual betterment of one's life-long self-knowledge and self-realization. Could this help you to "tie in [your] selfish subjective experience/relation to . . . objective reality"?

Ayn Rand lived long enough to discover and present an immense system of thought as that guide you seek. If Stephen lives to a hundred, he may write a magnum opus to also help you further along.

My comment at Stephen's FB page: "Existence exists, we live." I follow your explanation of the inference from the former to the latter. Besides the corollaries of "Existence is identity" and "Consciousness is identification", I also know "Life iives", and "One is alive". What are other corollaries that lead from "one(self)" to "other" to "we"? Isn't the "other" an other "one", and "we", "more than one"?

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.

This is brilliant, innovative, and inspiring. It stimulates wonder and reads like metaphysical poetry. I'm fully engaged and in resonance with it as I marvel at it.

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.

Here's a cover from another Anthem printing:

Thank you. You've given me much to read and reflect on. (Anthem was my first, formative, Rand book, read in my late teens.)

Yours is another compassionate, inspiring heroic life.

What was the crucial idea that made you reject the (version of) Christianity you grew up with? How old were you then? How did you accidentally discover Objectivism? Was it initially mainly the art or the philosophy that attracted you? It appears that you were not, at least sense-of-life-wise, a Christian. Was God for you not Christian, but symbolic of some other supreme value? As for myself, my first encounter with "God" was after coming to Canada from China when a child (a decade before Objectivism) and, reading the word for the first time, I thought it was abbreviation for "Good", and it evoked feelings of reverence in me, even though I was not raised in a Christian or religious family.

Have you considered the possibility that the government is "allowing" it because the government (i.e., agencies, moral and immoral, of the government as exploited and manipulated by nefarious people) is complicit in the national security threat you're warning about? In my reading of 20th Century history, I've learned how governments, including in the US, have acted immorally and criminally with deception, death, and destruction on people domestic and abroad. When altruism and collectivism are invoked without opposition and refutation, individual and their rights can be discarded.