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.

As a reminder of the importance of the Alexander Technique (AT), I quote from the original post: For Objectivists, as for all individuals, a full mind-body integration is essential to health and happiness, and the Alexander Technique, in consonance with Objectivism, will take one a long way towards that integration. What you need is just the allotment of time and the life-long commitment to improve oneself - to straighten up, to move steadfastly forward, to free your will to seek and love life, to stretch and reach out for new values, to embrace gracefully your purpose with balance, harmony, and unicity. Head up and forward! So, if you've given little or no consideration to AT before, now is the time to reconsider. Like learning Objectivism, it's never too late, whatever your age, seven or seventy-seven or older, whoever you are, whatever condition you're in, however resigned you are to your state -- you can choose to change, to do better., that's what you can do. See "What Can One Do?"

No, one cannot, but can one, over time, become the other? Many (most?) Objectivists were formerly Christians (and Jews). Are there any Christians who were formerly Objectivists? Not all Christians are the same, each varying in their rationality and in their potentiality for becoming Objectivists. The more deeply rooted their Christianity, the less their potential. Unlike the Rand-friendly "new Christian intellectuals" referenced in the originating post, most Christians who encounter Ayn Rand's work malign and reject her value. The popular speaker and author Jordan Peterson is an example of the latter. A Jungian psychologist and pragmatist Christian, Jordan Peterson, posing as an individualist, says he "acts as if God exists" and who writes in his book, 12 Rules for Life: “the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. . . . [Life] has more to do with develop­ing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.” He also has said in his YouTube videos that, “Happiness is for stupid people at amusement parks.” For Peterson, Jesus is the “transcendent” exemplar of morality, who should be emulated in a life of suffering and sacrifice. Consistent with all this is his asserting, in more YouTube videos, that he does not “regard Ayn Rand as a great mind…not sufficiently sophisticated”, although he “enjoyed” reading her “superficial” novel, Atlas Shrugged. His participation on a discussion panel with speakers from the Ayn Rand Institute made no difference in his continual dismissal of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Contrast this with the aforementioned Rand-friendly Christians who aspire to become rational egoists in reverence to their "Galt-like" God. Are these egoistic Christians more or less dangerous than those like Peterson?

What specific help do you seek? A bodyguard? Money? More belief in and publicity for your plight? I sympathize with you in your condition and will help in ways that I can. I'm also mindful of, and defend myself where I can, against the dangers from communists, socialist, fascists, anarchists, welfare-statists, environmentalists, . . . from Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, Jews, even most atheists, . . . and from numerous other overt and covert enemies of Objectivism, who use the government or form secret organizations to further their agendas and stop those who oppose them. I'm on guard with you against them all. So, you may be outnumbered, but you're not alone.

Reverence comes from the love that one has for the highest values and ideals in one's life, a love that is earned by constant rational and productive action to create and defend those values. Reverence is an essential quality and reward of self-esteem. Ayn Rand has quoted Nietzsche's "a noble soul has reverence for itself", and identifies Self-Esteem as one of the three cardinal values of Objectivist ethics. Self-Esteem (or pride), for Christianity and other theistic/altruistic religions, is a cardinal sin, extolling an unreal or "suprareal" God to be the object of reverence (and obedience), drawing on people's need for reverence and romance, but, yes, misdirecting it away from the self. This God/Self dichotomy is the conflict that Rand-friendly Christians and theists try to resolve. Revert back to theism or reject it totally and redirect their reverence to their own selves.

Ayn Rand's noble romanticism, as she says in her Introduction to The Fountainhead, reclaims the emotions of reverence for the sacred back from traditional theistic religions' monopoly on them. Is this Objectivist romance for real ideals what attracts some Christians/theists to Ayn Rand's work, despite their Christianity/theism? Christianity's "transcendent reality" is God, and human earthly affairs are mundane. Galt's triumphs are "transcendent" in that they are heroic realizations of his highest ideals, the exalted becoming of his rational productive being. To be inspired by this noble, uplifting romance of Galt, is to "breathe in" and be energized by that "spirit".

The way I understand "self": Consciousness is consciousness of existence. Self-consciousness is consciousness of one's existence as a self that is conscious of existence. "Self" is an axiomatic concept, not as fundamental as "existence" and "consciousness", that integrates all the characteristics of a living, conscious entity. So the self, for humans, is at once a concept and a concrete being. The concrete self "conditions" the abstract self in that it's the concrete self that the abstract self refers to and is drawn from. Since human consciousness is the rational mind, the self is essentially the mind, but subsuming all the characteristics of the whole organismic mindful self.

That's the spirit! And the power to your victory. Fight them when you can. Shield yourself when you can't fight them. Ignore them when they matter little. Stay steadfast to the realization of your ideal man. Be happy.

Ayn Rand regarded religion as "primitive philosophy", as pre/non-rational explanations or responses to the types of metaphysical-moral questions you include as essential to religion. We know Objectivism's answers to those and other questions. Not until Ayn Rand and Objectivism, do Christians have a rational alternative to Christianity. Not for all Christians, but for those who are inspired by the triumph of John Galt but not by the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Since Christians are in the majority, many Objectivists come from Christian backgrounds, including those Christians, referenced in the initial post, who have yet to let go of their belief in a "transcendental" reality.

How would it be dangerous? Yes, it would be rough living, inconvenient and isolated, living a shrugging life, but would it be better than living under your present targeted persecution?

Without reifying the abstracted "self", and acknowledging the current unknowns about the evolutionary or neurological emergence of self-consciousness, one can observe extrospectively the emergence of the self in a child's growth from infancy to adolescence and beyond. And, one can also observe introspectively, the "emergence" or growth of one's own, continually maturing, increasingly distinctive self, as one engages productively with the world in a noble, purposeful way.