[...] recently here and here [...]

[...] hint of vulgar “exceptionalism,” to a small handful of other singular moments – as in the Hegelian world-historical concept, but with point of origin transferred to the New World from the Old: perhaps not as the biggest day [...]

The Wiki article on Sunyata quotes The Dalai Lama ( n the Geluga section)

According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is simply untenable.
All things and events, whether ‘material’, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence [...] [T]hings and events are 'empty' in that they can never possess any immutable essence, intrinsic reality or absolute ‘being’ that affords independence.[51]

The "simply untenable" refers the dea that x entity is empty because when analyzed, it can not be found ie found to be truly exsting. This is also rendered as "x can not bear analysis". This analysis has three parts: x has causes and conditions wthout which to ceases to (exist)(function) ; it has parts upon which it depends and; its label is a conceptual designaiton which (without the perception of emptiness) imputes an impossible mode of being (inherent existence) onto the base of designation. Emptinesss can not bear this analysis any more than anything else.

As I said, I'm not doing this justice.

(contd below)

bob:
To deny the inherent existence of this motion still allows its (and the comment’s) conditioned and functional existence.After all this motion is dependent on it’s existence on thought, subject etc.

In the PM approach, emptiness itself is a conditoned phenonomen with no inherent existence.

At this level of ontological inquiry we have to start paying very close, Heideggerian attention to the words we're using. Since we do not seem to be thinking of existence in the Heideggerian mode, as "ek-sistence" - see here, for example, under a rather forbidding heading: DEATH - are we using "inherent existence" to denote physical existence or materiality or substance or thingness or real reality - or to denote "the irreducibly true," which might have a different form altogether, and be more like Cohen's "impetus of the ascent," or Hegel's motion of absolute knowing, or Heidegger's "being towards"? From the latter perspective, we can say that "emptiness" "inherently exists," even though in relation to the former perspective it might refer to the unconditioned "non-existence" (or "not-yet existence"?) of (supposedly) existent-as-material things-in-themselves.

To deny the inherent existence of this motion still allows its (and the comment's) conditioned and functional existence. After all this motion is dependent on it's existence on thought, subject etc.

In the PM approach, emptiness itself is a conditoned phenonomen with no inherent existence.

There's a third term "between" affirmative and negative, "privative," which in grammar denotes the absence or removal of quality, but not its reversal into its opposite.

Hegel recognizes the thing-in-itself as, my words, a way of thinking about the thing that is irresistible to thinking, and so does not less exist than the thought of the existent or the thought of its non-existence, and exists for thought differently than the thought of existence, of non-existence, or of thought, but he affirms as irreducibly existing neither the bare existent nor the knowing subject, but the "motion" between all of these "moments," since to deny the last would require the absurd denial of the very same denial, or a claim not to be claiming, etc. It would be for us to deny that this comment is a comment. To affirm that this comment is a comment or these words are words is not to deny that a perspective can be imagined from which they aren't, in which there are no meanings or is no meaningful speaking, but that perspective is never the perspective of meaningful speaking, or is never spoken. The position was already, I think, well-developed among the ancient philosophers.

The PM approach is to make a non-affirming negation. Inherent existence is negated as an impossible mode of being. It does not affirm something in its place of inherent existence. This prevents the contemplation of contemplation of... loop - at least for a Buddha.

I assure you am not doing the PM view justice.

My question is despite all the twists and turns, does Hegel affirm anything as truly/inherently/by its own power/in and of itself/ideally existing?

Also, for some reason I translated Hegel's cube of salt into a cube of sugar, possibly because I've never encountered, I don't think, a cube of salt.

Here's a version of the discussion on-line. I don't vouch for the translation, but from skimming it, it doesn't look so bad.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phab.htm

Well... the language strains as we try to get behind built-in assumptions.

So the notion of "unconditioned awareness of the sugar cube" is the notion to be deconstructed, that Hegel and any phenomenologist, so presumably the Buddha if he's talking, is refraining from taking on faith. We know people see a sugar cube, and say "sugar cube," and assume others know exactly what they mean. But a "close look" at the sugar cube raises the question, naturally, of whether what we're looking at is "the sugar cube" or merely perceptions of familiar sugarcubenesses that we are simplifying pragmatically. So do we have perceptions, or perceptions of perceptions, or perceptions of perceptions of perceptions, etc.? Each notion has its own relationship to the entire possible structure of consciousness, or represents a different way of relating to an object as mental object. It is questionable whether a being that does not also experience things as real-existing unities or objects is a being with whom we can communicate. So I look at the sugar cube and can acknowledge that I'm also just associating perceived perceptions with perceived recollections of prior perceived perceptions, etc., but I can then take the entire complex of alternative ways of looking at the sugar cube and say that, for me and as far as I'm concerned for anyone else, that's what the word "sugar cube" means: all of the perspectives on sugar-cubitude from everyday pragmatic approximation to doubt as to its actuality amidst all manner of perceived perceptions. And similarly when I refer to myself as "me myself," "me myself" does not necessarily name a false and unsustainable view of "me myself" as simple and coherent, but is a shorthand reference for one way of organizing orientations toward the mystery of being, and why would anyone or ones ever think anything different?

I've been mulling this over, but can't fully think what I 'm getting at any rate not the least of problems is framing my mullifications. From a Prasangika Madhyamika viewpoint the crucial part here is: "our perception of a simple sugar cube right before our eyes implies numerous assumptions even before we consider the uses we might make of it, where it came from, etc."

In PM lingo, the most important of these assumptions (reflex is possibly a better characterization) is that it exists as a sugar cube without these assmptions ie to do so falsely imputes that there exists a sugar cube in and of itself. Imputing existence in this way is in fact a condition of the perception/awareness. Doing so makes uncondtioned awareness impossible.

All of this can be reframed by asking this: What does a Buddha see?

That actually does clarify some things, thanks. The other way to explore that is to question our Western idea that truth is at all separable from experience. Easterners emphasize "realization" first. Realize an unconditioned state or non-state and then get back to me. Speaking or not speaking from a conditioned state, no matter what words are used or not used, is never the same as what is expressed from an unconditioned state and never will be the same. The same words or non-words won't even be the same.

It's possible that under the "one reality" paradigm we're exploring, the "unconditioned awareness" would be the "reality under mystery of the cause of being" that Voegelin claims the ancients, like everyone whose awareness isn't occluded (i.e., by "conditions"), simply experienced and took as a given. This awareness of First Reality or simply reality, real reality, direct experience, would be what Voegelin wants to restore. It was Hegel's objective, among others, in The Phenomenology of Spirit to show that notionally "immediate" or we might say unconditioned awareness was never as simple as it seemed - that, in his example, our perception of a simple sugar cube right before our eyes implies numerous assumptions even before we consider the uses we might make of it, where it came from, etc. The point isn't that an unconditioned awareness of the sugar cube as object is impossible or undesirable, but that as such it is a pure abstraction. Moving beyond a focus on sensory perception alone always involves greater concreteness via relations, comparisons, embeddedness, etc. The point isn't that greater concreteness of sugar cube contemplation is "better," just that it "also" is, can be made an object of awareness to greater or lesser degrees of abstraction, as can contemplation itself, and contemplation of contemplation, and so on, though each degree of approach to contemplation of self contemplating etc. refers us to particular distinct aspects of the structuring of consciousness. The result makes for some of the hardest to follow but oddly rewarding, transportive and memorable passages in the book.

It's worth noting that East Indians see the Western consciousness as being more inclined to define itself with reference to the issues of time and history. I do that too out of continued western style habituation. What's wrong with it is that it "conditions" the human being. Eastern consciousness is committed in general to an "unconditioned awareness." So it's the opposite of believing (or not believing) that man is only what history has made him because any other choice would be an escape at the expense of what is real.

Don't see how anything I've written minimizes any Biblical anything. As for Jeremiah, I would leave it to much more learned observers to parse the contradictions or apparent contradictions between statements like Jeremiah's and other statements on the "attributes" of God. Of course, I may not understand your purpose in bringing it forward.

You'll find some way to minimize Jeremiah 29;11, as well,

It's a familiar doctrinal pseudo-difference, IMO, which is not to say that it's in any sense unimportant. So the typical Calvinists and other Reformed Protestants sooner or later point to "real life" - conduct or quality of life under diverse systems of evaluation - as demonstration of election, and so end up being exactly as interested in outward signs and "works" as Catholics, but do so from a pre-destinative ontology that is precisely as impossible as it is thinkable. They fall into Kant's Third Antinomy, which itself re-states the same conflict from the vantage point of reason alone: We can view the same lived event from the perspective of freedom and agency or from the perspective of pre-determination and causality, the materialist version of pre-destination and grace. At the absolutes or extremes, each view turns into the other again, often in ways quite vexing for the ideologue and followers.

The means of justification is a major difference between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Hope you don't mind that I edited the excerpt from the post that you referred to make it conform to an edited version of the original. I don't think it affects your statement at all.

This goes back, and was intended to go back, to the inquiry that started us off in regard to the Nones, and the role of the declaration of faith.

Actually, there is much of interest, and relevant to your point and I believe to mine, on the Biblos page on the verse that I mentioned. For instance, there's a literal translation from the Aramaic that substitutes "trust" for "belief":

For God loved the world in this way: so much that he would give up his Son, The Only One, so that everyone who trusts in him shall not be lost, but he shall have eternal life.

A possibly even more literal or etymological translation says this:

for God did so love the world, that His Son -- the only begotten -- He gave, that every one who is believing in him may not perish, but may have life age-during.

Not exactly sure what "life age-during" means, but the Weymouth translation, that also refers to "trust" rather than "belief," also gives a more secular-sounding turn to "eternal life":

For so greatly did God love the world that He gave His only Son, that every one who trusts in Him may not perish but may have the Life of Ages.

Am not saying that "eternal life," as in most standard English language translations from the Aramaic, is "wrong," only that it suggests a kind of prize that the believer receives in exchange for "just saying the magic words to himself," for performing an easy, subjective, passive act. "Is believing" and "trusts" both point to a more active state, and "having the Life of Ages" may - I don't know - point to something more concrete, not to a difficult to imagine or to want condition that Christian theologians have had difficulty and shown severe differences representing for the curious - singing forever and -ever in praise of God's perfection, or being resurrected bodily and hanging out with one's loved ones shooting the breeze and just feeling fine, etc. - but to an actual or active life commensurate to a Christian demand, joined to the "infinite development" as the Jewish idealist Cohen describes the unitary or eternalized world. So this difference between passive belief and demonstration or actualization or result of belief or of authentically being a believer turns into another restatement of the dichotomy to be thought-experienced as closed, and closed in the figure-being Jesus Christ. We might see every prophet and God-man as such a figure-being - Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, Akhanaten, even the apotheosized Emperors of Rome - and we can and perhaps only experience ourselves or "ourself" in this way, but Voegelin, Hegel, and history argue for the Christian articulation as the purest or only pure, as well as primary, as well as conceptually exhaustive articulation for the only universal humanity we happen to have.

John 3:16 encapsulates a question, is belief static or dynamic? I believe threfore I am saved. Or, I believe and every action I take is the belief or nonbelief. That is, belief only exists in one's actions, not mental constructs.

This was brought home to me a few years ago when the local paper did a Christmas time write up of the Council of Churches's jail minstry. Outrage ensued at giving jail inmates small items that would make ther lives easier. Then outrage at the outrage ensued.

A minster wrote to the effect that Jesus died for our sins and that this was an object lesson on what happens when you turn the other cheek etc. That is all one had to do was beleive in Jesus. Acting like him was foolish.

"God becoming or incarnated as (a) human being remains the indistinction of transcendence and immanence, even if seen as the disappearance of the former into the latter. In all instances, questioning whether the result is to be thought “spiritual” (transcendent and absolute as for Hegel as Christian) or “material” (immanent and absolute as for Kojève’s Hegel as atheist) refers us back to the solution announced in Christ, and in principle socialized in secular modernity, and whose deferred collapse as difference or dichotomy is historical time."

The physical is the spritual, the spirtual, the physical.

I didn't intend it as snarc, Voegelin comes part way to understanding this, from his paradigm,

Darn, shoulda just copy-pasted the parallel translations page from Biblos of John 3:16. Would have saved me so much time and effort.

John 3; 16 made the point much more succinctly, recall Nietzche did not rejoice at his claim that 'god was dead' because he knew what horrors would come after. Faith is about belief, in those things unseen, you either do or you don't.