Ordered Liberty

Liberty

Life itself is ordered liberty.
Our arrogant creation, society,
is an improvement even of that ...
else all our deeds are but a sham.

________________________________________________________________

The tweet of this thought is here.

The context of this thought:

The paradoxical term "ordered liberty" is the same term used here ...

source: Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

"It's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked aking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity."

...

Comments

Seth says

some Facebook dialogue here

Seth says

MR 2013-01-25 06:54:37 16404

Who orders the liberty in your picture?

"Who" usually refers to a person an organization or maybe even a corporation or a government. In many of my pictures those kinds of entities could not be said to to have created the order i observed. The pictures were taken in a wild park which is left primarily to nature but is minimally tended by King county. The path through it is periodically cleared by park workers. Wood peckers had chipped away at a dead tree stump scattering wood chips on the ground. The wind had knocked over a tree which had upended the earth as it fell. The spiders had woven their webs and dew had formed droplets on them. The moss grew wherever it could. The plants had unfolded shaping their leaves according to their nature and those had mostly fallen to the ground because the Earth had turned to Winter. Some mysterious process had polished a fallen tree trunk and some other creature had made its white froth on dead sticks. As i walked back through the neighborhood gardeners had landscaped foliage and the city of Renton had posted traffic signs.

Mark de LA says

seth 2013-01-28 09:21:31 16404

MR 2013-01-28 08:51:56 16404

seth 2013-01-28 08:28:01 16404

MR 2013-01-28 07:44:34 16404

It is the distinction of what's so & what you make up about what's so (or what is perceived) - living an illusion or not. For me it is closer to the Tao or Zen way of being. The eight parts of speech are not all the same.

Well in a sense everything that enters our consciousness ... everything that we apprehend ... is "what we have made up" ... it is at best just a reflection of "what's so". Our lives and their meaning are just the same. We make them up. For me, that is not to say they are illusion. The word has such negative connotations ... something is being faked .. something is being distorted ... something is in error ... something is not authentic. But life is none of those ... unless, of course, that is what we are making of it.

The same goes for society ... for civilization.

Everything that enters my consciousness is not made up - more likely it is quite the contrary. Consider just at the start that if something "enters my consciousness" then it must have been there before my consciousness was there to be entered.

Perhaps it is more that you need to construct it in your mind for it to register there ... hence to be conscious of it. Consider the predicament of a baby. At first they my see only shades of variations of light and dark. Yet the optics of the eyes and the neural pathways are already grown. The babies instinct to reach out and grab is also part of how it constructs the "reality" of space and things that it comes to live within. I don't know of anything that can be excluded from that process that dove tails into being conscious of things ... even spiritual beings. Do you?

How does the thing's existence prior to your personal apprehension of it, alter that process? Note that when you dream or hallucinate those things don't pre-exist and seem rather to be illusions ... completely constructed by a mind disconnected from that which "is so".

I don't hold things that way.
   I prefer the description provided by Peter Ralston in one of his Mind seminars & which I provided via 3976. Most of these separate steps I can find in my own experience. Some are so quick that they blur.
     A baby does not have fully developed pathways in its brain. They develop with experience. A baby knows little more than an otherness & that otherness is on it's side (friendly has milk, but does not have those words or language even) - before it learns to cry to get otherness to be there.
     I hold my brain to be a sense organ for thought etc.

Seth says

MR 2013-01-26 09:05:14 16404

seth 2013-01-26 08:03:12 16404

MR 2013-01-25 11:16:51 16404

seth 2013-01-25 11:09:13 16404

MR 2013-01-25 10:34:28 16404

I could as easily ask what being orders a hurricane or a virgin forest? The point of my asking is to get closer to the idea that the order is in your mind & not necessarily in the external world. It is similar to watching a bird go from one place to another or like I just observed a cat creeping along a ledge in the building next door "looking for something (maybe a bird or a mouse)".

Yes, certainly, order is an experience of a person's mind and not *necessarily* in the world apart from a mind. If i see a stick there, and another one over there and then i say, "there are two sticks", that two-ness of the sticks is in my mind ... it is not a property of the sticks themselves. Though that is not to say that different minds can not come to the same description of the order of things ... as such, order, is something that we can share and recognize as something that is independent of our minds ... the spiral pattern of the pineapple for example. My mind did not arrange those spines, rather it recognized their arrangement.

Because the "order" is in more than one mind does not mean it is in mother nature. It is just the way humans generalize things.

An order is not "in nature", nor "in the mind", but rather is a relationship between them.

perhaps & still it resides in the mind.

Well even your couplar "resides in the" looses it's meaning when we talk about a process like that which we call "mind". Some things have a location relative to the Earth. Seth Russell, for example, is in his house on 170th Place. That is where he is. But where is my thought above? That does not have a residence. It does not have a geographic location. I really do think that when you talk of mind, you pretty much need to get away from naive spatial notions.

Seth says

MR 2013-01-27 13:10:06 16404

MR 2013-01-27 13:08:45 16404

seth 2013-01-27 12:51:22 16404

MR 2013-01-27 12:33:29 16404

order is a concept so is liberty. liberty has no physical substance to appear in a picture. the liberty in your picture is ALL your imagination which also does not show up in the picture.

well true, order and liberty are concepts ... what is more they are concepts of our consensus reality and as such we both have the ability to recognize them when we see them. no, you we will not find them in substances alone ... but rather in relationship that are reflected in our minds from those substances. answer this questions honestly ... did you see any order in the pictures ... did you see any freedoms in the pictures?

Nope !
I saw lots of pretty plants & messy woods.

metaphor & analogy are not the things themselves & you can't take pictures of them!

Your own descriptive words, "pretty" and "messy", refer to what i also am talking about. Although my assertion, "Life itself is ordered liberty" is a gross generalization of your interpretations. Thanks for your answer.

All of that is just an introduction and context for my complete thought itself.

Mark de LA says

seth 2013-01-26 11:27:29 16404

MR 2013-01-26 11:01:28 16404

seth 2013-01-26 09:45:39 16404

MR 2013-01-26 09:04:20 16404

seth 2013-01-26 08:05:27 16404

An order is a restraint, a restriction placed upon a freedom. So "Ordered Liberty" is really a more complete term than either "Order" or "Liberty" alone. I like it.

... but less complete than just plain liberty which has no restriction!

no restrictions is chaos static and heat. have fun with that

less restriction is not those it is I choose. "Do what thou Wilt", etc.

You are talking about a different aspect here. That is a problem when we talk so generally here ... you forget what is foreground and what is background ... what is specific and what is a generalized rationalization.

Go back to the pictures ... go back to your original question ... "Who orders the liberty in your picture?". There, regardless of how you answer your own question, the answer is certainly not "Do what thou Wilt". "no restrictions is chaos static and heat" is a true sentence in the context of this thought.

That is because there is no liberty in your picture. QED. or you could say Mother Nature but then you have to get into metaphysics to explain it.

Mark de LA says

MR 2013-01-28 07:44:34 16404

Somewhat related is this post from facebook: (which somewhat agrees with you except they have left out the zen side of things)

Three Laws of Performance

‎"We are merely pointing out that our actions relate to how the world occurs to us, not to the way that it actually is." Dave Logan, Steve Zaffron

Seth says

amazingly we are still on the first sentence of two making up a complete thought.

Seth says

MR 2013-01-26 13:31:33 16404

seth 2013-01-26 11:27:29 16404

MR 2013-01-26 11:01:28 16404

seth 2013-01-26 09:45:39 16404

MR 2013-01-26 09:04:20 16404

seth 2013-01-26 08:05:27 16404

An order is a restraint, a restriction placed upon a freedom. So "Ordered Liberty" is really a more complete term than either "Order" or "Liberty" alone. I like it.

... but less complete than just plain liberty which has no restriction!

no restrictions is chaos static and heat. have fun with that

less restriction is not those it is I choose. "Do what thou Wilt", etc.

That is because there is no liberty in your picture. QED. or you could say Mother Nature but then you have to get into metaphysics to explain it.

I have no idea what your word "that" refers to.

Sticks and leaves fall where they may in the forest ... that shows in my pictures. Critters compete for space and resources. No powers of man restrain most of the processes that were illustrated. Things appear differently to different minds ... perhaps you do not see the freedoms in the forest and attribute what happens there and where things come to be as evince of some overruling ordering principals. But whatever it is, i have no idea how you can say "there is no liberty in your picture" or what you think QEDs from your presumptions.

Saying the order or even the disarray comes from "Mother Nature" is to say almost nothing at all. I mean they could have put up a sign there before entering the woods ... "Enter and see Mother Nature at work" ... that would have been too easy and would have shed no light on the reality of our perceptions ... at least not in my humble opinion ... i'm glad they didn't.

Mark de LA says

Seth says

MR 2013-01-27 15:18:19 16404

seth 2013-01-27 15:02:29 16404

seth 2013-01-27 14:55:57 16404

MR 2013-01-27 14:29:57 16404

Yep, those words are adjectives. Can't take pictures of adjectives either.

Sure you can, the log is shiny and polished.

Have you forgotten how words describe the things we see?

This one is better viewed in high resolution, full screen here. It was actually surprising ... i have no idea what natural process polished that log

Those are all in the eye of the beholder. They modify nouns but are not nouns themselves. It is the attached language that makes the stuff in the picture one way or another to you & different to perhaps someone else.

Well i think pictures can illustrate nouns, adjectives, and adverbs and even conjunctions. Of course, uninterpreted signage... whether it be pictures or words ... is just uninteresting marks without our miraculous minds to make something of them. What does harping on those abstractions and confusions of language and illustration add to the piece? For me it seems just an excuse not to look at it.

Seth says

anyway, Jon Stewart kind of nailed it again ... listen at least the the Glen Beck stuff ...

Seth says

source: excerps of William Blake and the Fossilization of the Imagination ..

Blake attributed this unshakeable weariness to the implementation of systems. They are built on logic as a means to seize truth of reality, thus they are all, essentially, the same. He saw them as dangerous because they fossilize so quickly, becoming a paralytic instead of an accelerant. The pursuit of convention led to a dullness which prevented any kind of appreciation, even in the form of tradition.

....

As we approach our own society, still blackened with the soot of Blake’s fears and warnings, we must ponder the meeting of active and passive, imagination and reason, good and evil in our own lives. We should question which conventions detract from our engagement with life even if they are convenient. And we need to reflect that perhaps the presence of evil in this world allows for a better observation of good.

Further, we must acknowledge that while contraries lead to better understanding, better systems, and better lives, somethings are objective. Somethings, though encouraged to be disputed come out on top. Those are the things worth believing and the things that make the struggle to understand worthwhile.

... well worth a detailed read, thanks Breck.

i can see my life as a struggle between chaos and order, between Lucifer and Ahriman. Grocking and using opposites, contrasts, and the paradox of contradictions, is certainly on my agenda. My best solution so far is plastic habits but it is not yet enough.

Ordered Liberty

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Three Laws of Performance

‎"We are merely pointing out that our actions relate to how the world occurs to us, not to the way that it actually is." Dave Logan, Steve Zaffron

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