> > Everybody knows that foreigners are wrong and their
> > own leaders and elders etc. are right.
>No. People agree with their leaders and elders for social reasons, not
>epistemological ones.
And the difference is what? They still know that their own people are right, not liars. The Illuminate lacks this surety.
> > OTOH the Illuminate knows from his own insight that what his
> > leaders and elders say is wrong just as much as the foreigners.
>Again, I must disagree. This insight reveals some form of transcendental
>truth, not the falsehood of others. That others are liars is a given.
And the transcendental truth revealed is the unreality of world (or to put in other words: Everything Everybody says about it is wrong).
>I personally cannot accept the notion that Illumination has the negative
>definition you've proposed, for several reasons that it would be quite
>tedious to delve into at any length.
It really depends what you think I am talking about when I say Illumination. I do not believe that what Nysalor taught Illumination (in the RQ or HW sense) - rather Illumination is a fragment of his teaching that could somehow survive on its own. Since Arkat destroyed Nysalor, Illumination is the only thing left because of the god.
I do not believe that the Lunars are illuminated according to the definition of the HW rules - rather their mystical knowledge is complete.
For these reason, I don't have any problems with describing Illumination in terms of a curse.
>I fail to see that there is any effective (or pragmatic) difference between
>knowing that "what everybody says or believes is wrong" and knowing that
>there is "no difference between ... desires and ... ethics".
There is a difference is between saying "I cannot see anything that is true" which is what most illuminates know and saying "There is no truth whatsoever (therefore it matters not what I do)", the conclusion that Dark Siders draw.
>Although I would agree that the categories of True & Not True
>can certainly be an object of Illumination, I doubt that this is
>a universal.
IMO the illuminate does not consciously work with categories of True & Not True. His illumination is not about working with categories at all. On the HW list, I described it as the period from the time when Buddha witnessed the four sights (an old man, a sick man, a corpse and an ascetic) to the time he sat under the Bodhi Tree. That time of seeking was done without him philosophically trying to unify categories - rather he was looking for something that gave him spiritual reassurance. But all the paths that he tried (save the last), he found wanting. Likewise the illuminate would try something new, expose it to his illumination and be unsatisfied.
> > In HW terms, they lack the mystic's ability to refute and
> > the mystics consider them damned.
>Well sorry, but "what everybody says or believes is wrong" sounds
>like pretty drastic Refutation from where I stand...
Refutation is the ability to clear away what is wrong and to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond. The Illuminate does not have this ability.
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