Yesterday (10/18/06) the site posted an NBN in comment upon an NBN of the previous day (10/17/06). These two NBNs were sent to a small list of people who all said: “I understand the first NBN. It’s concrete. But I don’t understand the second NBN. It’s abstract.” This is a predictable response, but it is instructive and important for Institute readers to understand it. It is part of our Off Campus Seminar teaching.

 

The concrete NBN is what we call a “translation” of the abstract NBN. In other words it is our understanding of things in Speech about the understanding of the Truth of Existence.  There are only two modes of this truth. The “truth of existence” refers to what we do where we do it. That means the Truth of Existence is about its Terms; about the Terms of Existence. Readers of this site (and of SANE) have heard about this often.

 

The Terms of our Existence are our self or Self as such; others or Society as such; where these are or World as such; and the Whole or transcendence as such. Of course it is this last, the Whole, meaning  all of reality, from which the Truth of Existence is known.  The paradox in this is not an easy thing to deal with for what exists is different from what the Whole “Is”. It is known by the rise or the fall of the other Terms. Whereas all existence is bounded by coming into it (to existence) and going out of it, “life and death” as we call it simply, the name for the Whole is what is not this same action. Non-existent “existence” or what is not really existence at all, but what it is men call Being.

 

Although you could say this means “always existing existence” this would be wrong; a contradiction in terms literally. The Truth of Existence as the rise or fall to It refers to the action of the Terms with respect to the Whole. You see, inferring from these few points, that the Terms, by themselves, are somehow inert. For example, Hobbes, one of the three Founders of the Redirection or the Epoch of the New Science, tried to depict this in the State of Nature. All the [human] beings are Solitary beings; they do not recognize a Self, do not live in any Society, and World has only the meaning of “universe”, in effect endless repeated, identical matter.

 

The first or concrete NBN of (10/17/06) is a translation of what is meant in saying the Epoch of Science or what is experienced by us as Self and Society effects the action of the Whole as a Completion of it according to our making the Part (the Terms of Existence) the Whole. The translation of this is the order of these Terms (Self, Society and World) is crafting the Whole from its absence. The Whole, when crafted, will be the Part. If you read this first concrete NBN again you will yourself be able to translate it, back to what is the abstraction of the second NBN of (10/18/06). Supposing you know nothing at all about any of this as discussed to this point we think you will be obliged to come to the “technical” part of the abstract NBN on your own. Try it.

RJL - DY

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