Hello Nicole!

Thanks for letting me know that you agree with much that I wrote.

No, I don’t know about Francisco. But I do know him ☺️ If only he studied Aristotle, I used to say. It’s such a weird thing to extend someone else’ work without giving credit. Is that what you were referring to? He didn’t know though!

But truly these ideas are perennial. They just keep reappearing.

Thought thinking itself. Being becoming itself. Ah such strange constructions. Full of selves that are themselves absent from any Buddhist understanding. Did you know that ‘auto’ once meant ‘self’? Barfield describes the slide from self to mechanism so beautifully. Don’t you think? I’m glad though that Francisco has tried to move us away from mechanistic constructions, to once again entertaining the spontaneous — even though it is couched in such selfish terms.

And yes, I get exactly what you say about empiricism! So important to the idea of Verificationism that underlies the scientific method today, which engenders such emotional appeal within the field that no one has ever bothered to prove its central point that nothing can be true unless it is verified. Of course in the ‘Eastern Wisdom’ traditions, Empiricism is also very important. It takes so much work to overcome the obscuring effect that it has on the central insight of all these traditions: that something must be true before it can be verified. Or in simpler terms: Truth is never contingent on knowing it. Did you know that? See, even so, it’s still true!

Yes, scientific knowledge can never be true or false in an absolute sense because it doesn’t operate in the realm of the absolute. Spiritual traditions, on the other hand, know when to shut up, and that is the most salient difference between the two.

Have you read my article “Guru-ship For Dummies?” I’d love to know what you think about it.