Right. What I think may take something like Nagarjuna beyond something like Kant and Hume is the Nagarjuna's assertion that Srinjata is itself empty, that emptiness, the assertion of emptiness is also non-absolute, is also empty in itself. Do you think that takes him beyond Western thinkers in his logic? It certainly takes him,

yeah, it certainly takes him beyond someone like, you know, Connor Hume, sure, absolutely, right? But not beyond someone like Maister Eckhart, or, you know, the desert of the real and that, you know, that God is no thing, and therefore the truth of everything is no thingness. That kind of logic, I think, is that kind of move is findable I think in many Western mystics as well. Right. So yeah, and I think that that's what, obviously at least Kant at least believes in God or whatever. And so there's always a yesh, there's always something, other than nothing. And I think that's just an axiomatic difference between specifically Buddhism, right, than something like, you know, even then Adyctava Danta or even certainly in Hinduism, where Brahma is really real, and it is not empty. That's what's gonna obviously separate the folks in the Upanishads and the folks like the Buddha. So yeah, certainly it's a different axiomatic, right? It's an axiomatic of emptiness or whatever. But the idea that the principle of identity has valences depending on the metaphysical resolution of analysis is not unique. Right. Right. To Eastern thought. Right, that's a very interesting one. I think

that maybe you may be pointing to something interesting here which I didn't think about where mystics both East and West may take sort of a step of double negation or a double apophasic which brings them back to a cataphasis which may be unique to the mystics. I'm curious to know if you think this might be the case. And I think, I think, although with with the Buddhist thinkers, for example, they'll talk about in terms of emptiness, I think someone like Ali Shankara, you know, the Avada Bhadanta thinker, will do this sort of same double play in his non-duality where he'll say that even the non-dual is non-dual and he'll, to point where it seems like, like for the mystic, for my Stachar, emptiness is fullness and fullness is emptiness. Do you think there's something unique in that mode of thinking across mystics? I'm really keen to discover like a logic of mysticism.

Yeah, I think this is an interest that I can, I've seen lots of people have, right, this sort of this sort of Chomsky, Chomskyan desire for the deep grammar of mysticism. Yeah. I'm skeptical that such a thing is there. I am pretty. In fact, I'm very pessimistic, it's not the right word, but I'm somewhat pessimistic about even the possibility of comparative mysticism. I think that works at a very, like, again, like a really low resolution, but the higher resolution you get, the more you realize these people are doing something actually very different from one another. It depends on the axiomatic, right? Like, if the axiomatic is that God is the kind of, or the absolute is kind of Pleroma, that's going to lead you inexorably to a certain kind of logic, right? And if you think that fundamentally, that there's nothing, the shrynya todha, there's, you know, there's emptiness, that's going to lead you to another time. And I think that once you get to either one of those positions, right, things start to look a lot the same. Yes. Right. Things start to look a lot the same because I don't know, and this may just is probably just a limitation of the nature of language itself, that when you get into the realm of the absolute, whatever that realm is, it would seem like basic concepts like space and time and fullness and emptiness. I don't understand how those concepts could even apply in that kind of situation. Yeah, and so that's why I would say, right, that insofar as people are talking about them, mystics talk about them, they must have to be analogizing, right? And again, I think that's part of the reason why when they're more than happy to wrap up what they're saying by saying, yeah, none of this stuff is accurate, none of this stuff is really good. Or another way, and also I think nothing I'll say about this contradiction business is that language, language does a lot of weird things right like not all, obviously not all languages propositional, like we tell jokes, jokes aren't propositional or they shouldn't be propositional, something's wrong with your jokes if they're propositional. So we do all kinds of weird things with language like tell jokes and I think that one of the weird things we could be doing with language, right, is that we could be using something like contradiction, I think of the Zen koan tradition, right, we could be using contradiction not as a mechanism for describing ultimate reality, but as a soteriological mechanism for like breaking down consciousness. And so I think another thing that could be happening in some of these texts where one thing that could be happening right is that it could just be the use of the contradiction of soteriological. It's there not to describe anything but to actually help you break consciousness or to help you get out of the rut of thinking about the world the way that you think that it is. That's one thing. Also, it just could be the case that some of the mystics are just, and I think of Heidevich here, they like, Heidevich, right? She's all about wisdom, not all about reason. She in fact says, like, reason never lies. Right? And then she also says, and reason can't describe love, and that's what fundamentally is real. But there's just a, there's just a ceiling, perhaps. A ceiling that reason can only get you so far, and after that point, you're, you're on your own, right? There's no, no logic or reason at work. That seems completely possible, probably likely to me. There's no reason to believe, I think, that the consciousness that we have has evolved to understand the fundamental nature of reality. And so what it could be the case, there could be this an interesting kind of tragedy about human beings that we can experience it and yet we don't have, we do not have and cannot have the tools to describe it. Right,

right. Those, yeah, those, those are very, those are interesting possibilities and that would explain perhaps why they're engaging in the language which they are. Yeah, and I think the debate will go on about whether, say when the Azzent tradition or any other mystical tradition engages in the paradoxical, whether they're simply doing that to mess with the head of the mystic in training, so that they let go, or whether they fundamentally believe that reality is paradoxical in there and they're attempting to describe something metaphysical. And I think it's going to be hard to go either way on that. But I'm open to your suggestion. And I think there may be a sense of when mystics use poetry as well. And in the poetry, they're not talking propositions. And they're talking something which is attempting to cause some sort of change of heart or state of mind. I want to, I want to actually, because this is, taken time, I don't think that we're going to get to the final round of questions of verticality and the bridge between epistemology and metaphysics. But I do want to pick up on something that you've mentioned almost in passing, which I think I disagree with, and perhaps will end on this point with your permission. You mentioned just now that your intuition is that the actual possibility of doing a valid compared mysticism only works at a very granular level and when we zoom in that becomes a non-feasible project. And I think this is related to something that we went back and forth in email about where my reading of the mystics is that there is, and I would be very happy to disagree here, is that there is a quintessential mystical experience. There is something of a commonality in the experience of the mystic that unites them. And this is obviously a very contentious statement. I'm well aware of the issues involved in saying that. But I think that at a very minimal level, we can assert that there is some form of unity or non-duality that occurs or that makes itself apparent in the experience of the mystic. And that there's therefore a very basic metaphysic which follows necessarily from that experience, which is some sort of metaphysical theology or mythology or some sort of eulogization which is at its core unitive or seeking to do away with fundamental oppositions between subject and object or divinity and creation and therefore there would seem to be a logic at play, which could be common amongst mystics, and therefore, there could be an enterprise of comparative mysticism, or there could be the term mysticism applied globally at all. And I have the sense that you disagree with that. I would love to hear your thoughts.

I mean, so I guess my, I guess the first thing I would say is that they're, that already out of the gate, right, that the idea that monism and non-dualism are different things logically speaking, right? And so like, so the first thing I would ask is if it's, even if it is both non-dualism and monism, that shows that there actually is some significant difference among mystics about what the story is, right? That a non-dualism is different, I think, logically speaking, than a monism. For instance, a non-dualism can also just be that there's just actually an infinite amount of disparate non-related metaphysical reality, right? That difference, that there's a metaphysics pure difference, I love to lose or something. Do you want me to speak to that point? Or do you want to finish your,

your

life? Yeah, yeah, feel free. Yeah. So that, that, that'd be my first, your first point. Okay. My first point is that we would have to decide if there is some shared thing, it would have to be

one of those. I, I guess. Right. So my, my, my thinking is influenced by, by David Loy and there may be sort of intimations if he's thinking throughout the conversation where taking the case examples of Buddhism and Hinduism, this can be applied broadly to any monistic and in contrast to a non-dual system. Loy's argument is, and I think rather convincingly, that there are two moves in the mystical experience, which itself is totally ineffable and non-propositional, as we've been saying up until now. There's no label that one discovers that says all is one or nothing is two. There's no core premise that's, you know, that you don't crack open the cookie and then find the secret proposition. But in the experience of the melting and the disillusion of any boundaries, that can be read in two equally valid logical outcomes, both as a total expansion of self and divinization of self, which would lead to a monistic position that, you know, or a pantheistic, or panentheistic, but in some sort of system where there is something and it's all one. Or it leads to a position where there's what I thought was me is not and there's nothing and that leads to a dualistic position. So it's the same experience of unity, which I think leads to a monism and a non-dualism in this context. I think non-dualism can be spoken of in other contexts, but I think in this context, they both equally logically flow from the same experience. And I think, I'm really curious to know what you think about this. I think that when, for example, a Gnostic in one region and millennia talks about a Pleroma, and when a Bodhis talks about a Shanyata, or the Kabbos speaks about the Ainsof, the nothingness. Although they're talking about the everything and the nothing, I think it's very clear in their own writing and the writing of many other mystics that they're actually talking about the same thing. The same thing which is fullness is emptiness and the same thing which is emptiness is fullness. And I think, I mean, the Buddhists make this very clear where they say that that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. So I don't think that monism and non-dualism are fundamentally other. I think it's simply just one is cataphatic and one is apophatic. What is attempting to negate and what is attempting to affirm?

Right, I mean both may be both may be reasonable metaphysical responses to an experience, but that doesn't mean they're the same thing and that they both could be true at the same time. The question is are they

are they contradictory points or are they just two alternative perspectives describing the same fundamental reality that are compatible and complementary?

Yeah, so if you would argue for a compatibilism, you have to give an argument for that compatibilism. Because I think that there's two arguments here, right? One argument is they're both of those positions are reasonable deductions or whatever from the experience. That's one argument. There would be another argument to show that they're compatible. That they're compatibleistic understandings of the world. And I also would say the mystics themselves probably wouldn't say they're compatible. I'm pretty sure if I got a Gnostic, like if I got Valentinas in the room with you know with Lautz-Duh or whatever and I got you know Haidith and all these different know, mystics that existed in the Myatrician or whatever. I'm pretty sure I got them all in a room and asked them, are you guys all talking about this same thing? I bet they wouldn't say they are. In fact, I mean, the mystics often tend to be quite, some of them tend to be quite militant. You know, Bernardo Clairvaux was all about, you know, the Crusades and everything else. So one, it would be interesting that us, and I would say me as a non-mystic, I suppose, and that I know better than them, right? That we would say, yeah, they are all under the hood, they're all the same thing, but if we got them all in the room, they would perhaps even violently disagree with the same thing. That's curious, right? And then two, you have to provide some kind of argument for the compatibilism between the non-dualism and the... just because it's a reasonable response to a similar kind of experience, assuming those experiences are actually similar, which I'm not sure that they are.