I could offer a point-by-point rebuttal (speaking as someone who is doing my best not to be convinced by either party) but it strikes me that it would be fairly pointless, because we'd be talking about our different /interpretations/ of something. We can never talk about our experiences directly because that's one of the limits of communication, especially verbal communication. Assuming otherwise is to court Ayn Rand-style objectivism.
Where'd you ever get those ideas? There's nothing at all pointless about talking about our different interpretations of things and we spend our whole lives doing it. Amongst those things are our experiences and of course we do, can and must talk about them. In fact, I think that while you could certainly try to rebut Joe's comments point-by-point, on several issues, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on and would come off as silly and bizarre as Jonx. (What, by the way, do you think of him?) In fact, just for sport, and because you seem like an intelligent enough fellow with some interest in weighing the relative strengths of the pro- and anti-Rawat camps, if you will, please give it a shot. You could start, for instance, rebutting this:
At an intro event, Rawat will say knowledge is simple and there is nothing you have to learn, but you have to spend 100 hours getting the proper "understanding," and so he won't give you the techniques immediately, no matter how much you want them (ahem, "thirst" for them).
or this:
You are supposed to be able to judge whether you like the experience or not, but you aren't supposed to doubt.
In fact, please try them all. (Good post, by the way, Joe!)
; Knowledge is natural and simple AND it's really hard? As an artist I try to work with 'natural' and 'simple' conceptual models. As a musician I try to work with 'natural' (for the medium) and 'simple' (for the context) musical bases, and it's really hard.
Sorry, but that sucked. The object of the exercise isn't to see if you can use all the words in one paragraph but to rebut the proposition that saying " Knowledge is natural and simple, but it's also really hard" is contradictory and makes no sense.
Knowledge is easy and natural, but you need somebody else to get to it I'm being critical of my own criticalness, but: Knowledge is easy and natural, but it helps to have somebody reminding you of its changing nature, preventing you turning it into a set of dogmas?
You've sidestepped the claim which, in this case, wasn't about "keeping it real" but rather getting to it in the first place. If K is easy and natural why would you need someone else to get to it?
Anyway, if these are your examples, if I were you I'd rethink my confidence that these contradictions are easily reconciled.
