For there to be community support that gives itself to speaking, there must also be those that love to listen. This is a necessary condition again, this is not a sufficient condition. And again, listeners must listen with one ear. Autonomy is found to be necessary, but not sufficient.

We have been told that Kant never declared autonomy and freedom to be absolutes; fine then. Living right, and ethical choices, require autonomy and freedom as necessary conditions; so says Kant. But Kant is unable to argue that what is found necessary explains away what is realized as sufficient. And what is found sufficient is closer to the driver of evolution; it is something found in religion.

We only know that speakers love to speak, and listeners love to listen. But what holds speaker and listener together to form the perfected agreement is again a middle-term that is beyond. And somehow I found a doorway to beyond our fractured selves given by the abundance of autonomy.

In general this is not the same issue as that of autonomy. Autonomy is a given, it should be the case in any normal society. It is not a precondition of abolition that men have a certain consciousness.

Gurdjieff talks about abnormal ‘man machines’, but he is himself the product of an abnormal spiritual culture that has deviated from true sense into diabolical occultism, and genocidal fascist politics.

“In the ordinary way the three nervous systems operate more or less independently, in sequence, so to speak; their different energies being confined to the functions for which they are most suitable. And when small amounts of these energies do leak from one system to another -as when a man tries to think when full of instinctive excitement, or on the other hand when he tries to reason about some deep emotion -only bad results are produced.
Yet these three systems are arranged so that, in certain circumstances and at one particular point in the brain, a connection could be created between them.”

“Such a condition, in which instinctive processes were as conscious as thinking, in which thinking was as fast as attraction, and in which reason, emotion, and action combined as harmoniously as breathing and sleeping, is at present unimaginable. We can only say that the human machine is in fact designed to make it possible.” – from The Theory Of Celestial Influence, chapter 10.

I continue it from where we stopped.

You may take as much day/s as you wish to consider carefully all that is written here until it clicks before replying.

Enough of this, Hucklebird. We deserve better here than shit objections to Kant on autonomy. Go do some homework.
Anyone else I would let it ride, but not you.

And if you are such a community fan, I hope you will stop being a Fox News groupie and propose Communism. The usual crap from rightists about community vs autonomy began with Hegel and ended up without an ethical system and community for the poor, and capitalist ‘autonomy’ for the rich, etc, etc….
Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’ is more than enough answer to all that.

Meanwhile I warned you years ago the guru in question would use you as a torpedo against me and indeed this blog. I get tired of it.
You might consider the EXTREME danger of surrendering your autonomy in this context. If you wish surrender your autonomy to a complete stranger who is playing guru, I hope for your sake he isn’t a sadist.
Meanwhile, these issues have been discussed a lot at The Gurdjieff Con. We have seen the danger to autonomy in the context of the ‘sufi hyena’ syndrome…

Meanwhile, the issues of Kantian ethics are very complicated. Make sure you study them before you make a sausage out of it.
The issue of autonomy arises very naturally in that context, and your remarks show little awareness of having read the definitions of the terms I am referring to.

Meanwhile, loss of autonomy in the context of many of these New Age gurus is a genuine calamity, a misfortune, worse than slavery, so if you have been mucking about gurus recently, as I warned several years ago, then I am sorry for you. I warned you on that point, and offered to keep an eye on the situation. You have cleared lost your autonomy, and seem unaware of what you are saying. Fight loose.

Enough here: we are talking about a simple issue of Kantian autonomy, a reference to his ethics. The terms are clear.

Autonomy and freedom are not without limits! Are you saying otherwise? Autonomy and freedom are only necessary conditions, just like survival is a necessary condition for biological evolution. Yet you did not leap to the conclusion that mere conditions of necessity (implied by natural selection) are enough to explain evolution. And history`s harsh conditions were not enough to explain the richness of bird songs, or are you now telling me they are?

If autonomy and freedom are taken as absolutes, then evolution would have stopped with the bacteria that would be unable to unite to form multi-celled organisms. If those things were absolutes, then ethics could be predicted from the behavior of free-bodies that interact to maximize their selfish interests, and this would validate scientism again. We would not know how to emphasize with each other. We could not share words. Liberalism would fail. And because oxygen is another free-body we could not reap the benefit of breathing, and we would die. Free-bodies, no matter how organized, will eventually fall to the second law of thermodynamics; they would die. And if we see ourselves as free-bodies then we would be very disappointed in the end, because our autonomous self must also be put to the grave one day. Yet life has an uncanny way of avoiding the fall into entropy, and putting it off until death returns and life is liberated in the ultimate act of free expression.

Buddhist will have us empty ourselves in an act of free choice. And this is for what purpose? To remove the clutter, so we can see things and ourselves more clearly. Freedom brings responsibility, and the responsibility comes with hard work to cultivate our selves where we find moral action that is self-evident. We must be free to find a better way, but the better way does not come for free. Buddhist meditation is hard work!

the issue of autonomy is too critically important for any compromises: at G-con blog we have looked at the dangers to those who are conned out of their autonomy by so-called spiritual traditions.