Future Talk

Warning: I have notes to myself in this post. Please ignore them.

To talk about future events is an iffy proposition.

Most future talkers use "representations" and symbols to interpret their experiences, and then to formulate them into communication with other people.

For example, many religious types will use the "representations", symbols, pictures, images, and formulas of The Book of Revelations to talk about the future, and they invariably end up with something of the flavor of

"The World is Going to End on October 10, 2:00 PM DST !!... Repent !"

Recently there have been a number of these and a bunch of Mayan end-of-times speech.

(Keep in mind that Dogma is composed of symbols and codes.)
It is one thing to use such representations to talk about experience of the future, and it is quite another to maintain that people who experience the future base their cognitions upon such representations and symbols. By asserting that our minds process the future event by a process that codes or transforms future intuitions or sensation by an intermediary symbolic form - such as "God" - is to jump the gun, so to speak, and explains why religious visions usually take on the symbolic codes of the religions existing in the areas and time periods in which they occur.

(notes to self :  Montag, the Representation is a mental event during cognition, and Symbol, Image, etc. are subsequent mental events and entities based upon the "coded" cognitive representation in the theory of  cognition with representations.)

When one senses the future, or even when one experiences The Holy, the experience is similar to a baseball outfielder fielding and tracking a hard fly ball:  there is no intermediation of symbolic form between the fast ball, the sunlight reflecting from it, and the eye of the fielder and the positioning of his glove and arm.

It is a process that incorporates the flight of the ball and the play of the fielder intensely. It is not separable into ball, light, fielder, and symbolic representation of ball's flight into some mental parabola.

The experience is between a human and The Holy or between a human and the Future.

There is no intermediate Symbol - which symbol can be easily wrested into a group of symbols and, thus, become a Dogma! - which intervenes.

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