“O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying.
I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another
man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on,
than be a king over all the perished dead.”
- —Achilles’ soul to Odysseus. Homer, Odyssey
It is common for Atheist to deny the existence of God asking such questions as:Why God would allow catastrophes to happen, like earthquakes, volcanoes, or evil to be committed, specially on Innocent children, or permit the existence of criminals like Hitler, or Stalin, and exterminate people by the millions, like the Holocaust?
It is a fair question, but in my opinion, not a very good one when we believe in Free Will, the question become redundant, Free Will permit individuals to do as they please, may this be Moral or Immoral that is a different question altogether! As death for catastrophe, does it really matter how, or when you will die since death is unavoidable?A better question in my opinion would be:Why God would give us the Gift of Existence, just to take it away after?
Wouldn’t this be the essential question, and the proof of God being Monstrous?
Wouldn’t this be the essential question, and the proof of God being Monstrous?
But since an Atheist do not believe in the Existence of God, the question is rhetorical, our Existence would not depend on God and therefore as Humans we bear on our own shoulders the burden of responsibility for our actions, therefore we couldn’t blame God for our own actions, or our eventual demise, could we?
Jean-Paul Sartre main idea is that we are, as humans, “condemned to be free.” This theory relies upon his belief that there is no creator, and is formed using the example of the paper knife. Sartre says that if one considered a paper knife, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because there is no Creator. Thus: “existence precedes essence”. This forms the basis for his assertion that since one cannot explain their own actions and behavior by referencing any specific human nature, they are necessarily fully responsible for those actions. “We are left alone, without excuse”. I respect Sartre and agree with personal responsibility for our actions, but excuse me, the paper knife has a creator, and a plan! And further more try to find an analogy that fit his existence precedes essence!
Only in the premise of God Existence we could blame God of anything we want, but of course this question, it is very old, and it has been answered by Religions through Genesis, Qur’an, and different Religious books pertaining to particular Religions, and Beliefs.
This Religions provide Men with an answer to complicated Ontological, Theological, and Metaphysical issues, that include an Eschatology.(A belief or a doctrine concerning the ultimate or final things, such as death, the destiny of humanity, the Second Coming, or the Last Judgment. This of course vary according to a particular Religion)
In the other hand Atheist lack any reason for Existence whatsoever since the existence of Men it is just a product of casualty, same as the Universe we live in, with no particular future design, a happenstance, the mere product of chance, with no meaning period, this of course throws overboard any notion of Morality, good or evil, turn to be just a mere subjective perception, granted, based on life lessons, and Empirical experience, but nevertheless with no ultimate meaning, if this sounds bad enough, add to that the inevitable death, and with it not a whiff of a promise of a future life, then we got nothing! Nonexistence period!
No wonder a lot of Atheist seem to be rabid, or at least in a mean mood at the slight mention of God, and death! This of course defending their truth. This so called truth, will not provide a consolation, not even a Pyrrhic triumph of right thinking Vs the wrongheadedness of those Theists, after all, once death how would you know you were right? In fact if there is any consciousness after death, that only would demonstrate you were wrong all along!
To an Atheist to be right posthumously is not even an unhappy prospect, but no prospect at all! It is a sad state of affairs being an Atheist, of course some Atheist in the Renaissance and during the Enlightenment were great Humanist, unlike those bloody Theist, I am afraid a virtue not shared by fellows Atheists Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, Mao Tse Dong, Pol Pot etc. However it is just to point out a believer should have moral reasons not to do evil, even if some do not follow their Religion well, and do wrong, on the other hand there is nice and Moral Atheist, who do not commit mayhem, and crime just because they can, even if there is no belief that oblige them, unlike their fellow Twenty Century Atheist mass murders. Now I do not want to throw decent law abiding Atheist with the likes of Hitler, or Stalin, but why so many of them figure Religion is evil and should be abolished because some misguided Religious individuals misused Religion as well? Should we abolish Free Thinking because the likes of Stalin and Mao? Belief or unbelief never has being a proof of Moral behavior, regardless, live, and let live!
Milan Kundera the great Czech novelist and essayist, and possibly an Atheist, speaking of Husserl wondering if European civilization would be able to survive at all wrote: (European Civilization understood as Western Thought in general)
“The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one sided nature of the European Sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.
The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called in a beautiful and almost a magical phrase “The forgetting of being”
Once elevated by Descartes to “Master and proprietor of nature” man has become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, posses him, To those forces, man’s concrete being, his “world of life” (die Lebenswelt), has no value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.”
The Necessary Being: Suppose a causal chain of infinite contingent beings. If one asks the question, “Why are there any contingent beings at all?”, it won’t help to be told that “There are contingent beings because other contingent beings caused them.” For that answer presupposes that there are contingent beings. But that is exactly what we wanted an explanation of (we wanted an explanation of why there are contingent beings). Any adequate explanation of why there are some contingent beings will have to invoke a different sort of being —an uncaused, necessary being. In response one can say that each individual being is caused but if we suppose the infinite chain as a whole it may be uncaused. i.e. it may be an uncaused being as a whole. In this case so far as we have gone through the chain, it is caused; The undiscovered remaining chain as a whole would be uncaused, the Necessary Being. (Check my post: Eternal or Cyclical Time Vs The Big Bang and Linear Time)
The need to Know, and the desire for Meaning it is a given in Men, Atheism is a brake for this natural tendency in men, since with a single stroke mutilate the realm of possibilities latent in Men and a future Existence, accepting the end by itself of a simple act like eating, not to talk about the whole of life, with no further design that the pleasure it bring us, it is a Hedonistic position, a reductionist view of Existence that renders life, and the Universe meaningless! We want to know the why, and what for? So we are not easily satisfied with and end of itself idea. After all as much we enjoy food as a pleasure, there is also many other functions food provides, like nutrition, health, sustain life, etc. Schools of Hedonist with their many variants, had existed through the ages, and once in a while they sprout here, and there, but the nature of their short time goals, based in their Atheistic views gives them also a short life span. In my view they die for lack of Transcendental views, a serious lack of curiosity, and above all Imagination!
The Atheist it is a tragic hero figure in the classic Greek style, he stands alone, burdening his shoulders with the responsibility of living a life he didn’t choose, devoid of any other consolation himself can’t produce, therefore he should love life and attach himself to it with tooth, and nail, because once existence is over, it is over for good. Of course the opposite is true too, he can hate it and reap vengeance on his fellow creatures, with no moral qualms whatsoever, evil it is not the sole province of the Theist. At least the Greek heroes had Hades, not much according to them it is true, but even that is something versus Nonexistence…
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary Atheism is defined as unbelief, but also as ungodliness, wickedness, and to top it all a doctrine…In all true it has been noticed by some that Atheism for many can become of just another belief as a substitute for Religion, a doctrine that went in fashion with the rise of Modernity, unfortunately like Modernity a creature of it’s times, it has become old news in this Post-Modern age were discourse it is no proof of anything because the limitations of Language to convey Truth, words being a hard thing to define, so Atheist has become just another doctrine like the exclusively male Clubs that were populated by white, misogynist, humorless, and easily irritated, know it all elderly gentlemen, well those clubs are gone and nobody seem to care!
Enough of diddling around in the Western intellectual way, let’s go to the heart of the matter!
My late Aikido Sensei, and Zen priest Kensho Furuya who loathed explanations, used to complaint:
“How does it works, explain me that?” As to the the question of his Western neophyte students.
“It is not even a good question!” He exclaimed.
“What about how does it feel?”
“You don’t ask, you do it, let your body not your mind find the answer!”
“Please when you come to the Dojo, seat, put your head on the tatami, and in this way we can begin our practice!”
“No questions, do not speak, do not think, you watch my initial demonstration, you do!”
Well, my Sensei wasn’t a post-Modernist, who had found out Language it is not a reliable tool to convey Truth, but like a good Traditional Zen practitioner since Bodhidharma, knew there is no point in talking, and that large winded explanations are useless, and not a substitute for EXPERIENCE.
In our Western Scholastic tradition we have worked mind and intellect in to a high degree of sophistication, and have achieved great things, however it also has lead us stray in to a point were common sense it is no longer so common. Trying to debate the existence of God, based in an intellectual idea of God as a separate entity outside of us who may, or not exist it is one example of how deep we have walked in such nonsense!
To the modern man, and here I include many believers, and as well as unbelievers, God has become not an experience a human being can live in his Being, experiencing with his body and soul, to the point it is not a matter of belief, versus unbelief based on so named reason, a word construct of his mind, the chatter box of his head, the representation of God as the other, usually a white old man, all this, it is easy to take as nonsense, but to render God to a simple idea in our heads, such subjective conception it is naive, to dismiss God in such base speaks of a reductionist, limited point of view, sort like the egg of Columbus all over again, it shouldn’t be possible because we can’t imagine it!
God is a Verb not a subjective idea, it require from us action, unfortunately most old established Religions had become institutions, fossilized, a mere ritual with no meaning, rather than a Living Thing, I will suggest for those skeptics, do not expect God coming to you and tell you: Here I am! To God you seek, get off your comfortable self and go look for it! Do not debate about it, “Oh my, who is right, should I believe, or not?” Go find by yourself if He is God or not! After all Moses didn’t have a need of battling Pharaoh, or climb Mount Sinai, searching for God, he was a prince in the land of Egypt, the favorite of Pharaoh, he could easily remain at the palace in a lazy divan eating dates until doomsday, Siddhartha Gautama also a prince could have done the same, and forget about Enlightenment and becoming a Buddha, and a Bodhisattva!
Do whatever, go help the poor, but by this I mean do not write a check, and put it on the mail, get up! Go and hold with your own arms somebody who is about to die, and bring consolation to him, feed the hungry with your hands, build a house for the homeless, etc. You got the idea, do something! That involves physical, and above all emotional effort to help the needy, the desperate, if this is not enough to find Him, become a Charismatic, or a Pentecostal, and if that even fails, go to Africa and participate in an Iboga Ceremony, or to the Amazon basin, and have a shot of Ayahuasca!
Fortunately, unlike the old sailor Columbus, Mystics of all ages don’t need the intellectual, or the economic approval of his contemporaries, neither they are in need of a passport to sail in to the Ocean of Self-Discovery, since the only requirements are a Will, and a Heart.
More often than not, Fate may deal us bad cards, life can be capricious, we may not find shelter against Nature, or Human cruelty, or it’s indifference, we may feel there is no God’s Mercy, or logic to our Human condition. But there is kindness, and goodness in us, life may seem like a random happenstance, but we can overcome Nature, and misfortune. When we have a need to be close to somebody, or someone may need us, we can look in to each other eyes, and bridge that distance, and find consolation to our sorrows. Sometimes when for a moment the deep darkness that surround us remain silent, we can like God extend an arm and with a finger create something wonderful, a melody, a poem, a painting, a concrete thing like a building, or a an act of kindness, that would outlive us, and surpass our finite existence, and will delight future generations with it’s beauty, or wisdom, that would defy adversity, if for a time. We can live with God in our Hearts, and when full of Him, He may look through our eyes, and speak with our lips, and address those who do not know Him, or refuse to meet Him. We can’t subtract our hearts to life, but we can fill and educate our hearts with goodness, and kindness, so it can rise above randomness, and misfortune, and face without breaking the most painful calamities, as One with God.
Kone, Krusos, Kronos 
I believe in the experience of being, that which is beyond words. This also means I don’t believe it is God or metaphysical or anything I can name. It just is.
I see the network of my brain and realize all my knowledge is relative because the network is a part of the universe and so I can only judge truth as subjective and relative (except the absolute truth which is beyond all concepts). And through relativity (logical deductions) I see there is no immaterial free will, there is only one life, I am my body and nothing else.
This makes me happy; I am a body, I may not know what that ultimate means, but I’m happy to live as long as my body lasts.
You could be perfectly content with yourself believing whatever you wish, but your subjective ideas don’t invalidate somebody else experience, that it is not the process of subjective discourse, like I believe the Universe work this way, or that other way, therefore it is impossible for God to exist, or oh, if you were under the influence of Ayahuasca, it is perfectly reasonable to understand that the chemical process in your brain made you believe all this weird stuff! My answer to you is; You try it and experience it, then we argue if your experience was real, or it was just another idea that cross your mind! Either you have experienced God, or you don’t, but if you never have a Mystical experience that open your Heart, all your ideas it is just the chatter box you carry on your head that never stop talking!
I have had that experience, but I don’t call it God because that sounds like it’s not a metaphor for something else, but a real factual personal God. God implies a Judeo-Christian God, a God as defined by the people of the Levant. That is not what I experienced. I experienced the unnameable, the mystery, that which has been metaphorized as the tunder of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the unity behind the duality of yin/yang, the necessary connection of all things related as portrayed in the black dot in the white field and the white dot in the black field, the emptiness, sunyata, of Nagarjuna, the love of Jesus or the Father he describes by saying “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust”, that which is beyond being and not being, beyond neither being nor not being, the transcendence of Leela, the sun God Ra, nirvana, brahman.
Joseph Campbell said: “You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: ‘Religion is a defense against the experience of God.’ the mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas, and emphasizing these concepts and ideas can short-circuit the transcendent, connoted experience. an intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience.”
Beyond Kantian concepts, beyond Nietzschean relativity, beyond all Derridian traces, that’s where the experience is, at the bottom of Apsu.
I am a materialist because I see the coherency of logically deduced material theories, and I will not misrepresent the mystery with personal interpretations of it, for your thoughts are subjective and so all your interpretations are flawed. Maybe you believe in an ineffable mystery, but I don’t think you’d call it God if you did. And if you believe in a Judeo-Christian God, then you’re basing your conceptual interpretations of that mystery on a literal history of philosophy and must defend your concept against other philosophers and historians, and in the case of the Judeo-Christian God the battle was over long ago, as Nietzsche says:
“Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!”
You say that my subjective experience doesn’t invalidate your subjective experience, which would have been true, but you’re not talking about a pure experience.
My ineffable experience is not up against your conceptual interpretation of your experience, but you cling to a conceptual interpretation
of God and therefore you’re up against the enlightenment of Buddha, Socrates, Nagarjuna and a long list of philosophers as well as all the scientists who discredit your concepts (that’s all they can do, they can’t discredit the pure experience).
I understand your idea of not want to give it a name, however in your discourse you use many times conceptual names to describe your experience, names that are derived of particular Cosmologies, like Leela, The Sun God Ra, Nirvana, Brahman, etc. with their correspondent particular Religions, and their particular Historical, Socio-Cultural negative baggage. Some Religions in the past have tried to refer to it as the Great Mystery, the not Named, because they were aware that one word do not encompass the Divine, and it is true the word God bring in many of us preconceived ideas with negative connotations, and that is unavoidable. However billions of people they give It a Name ; Allah, Brahman, Jehovah, etc. And that is fine with me also.
Shaykh Muhyiddin Ibn `Arabi is concerned with believers becoming limited to what they have found to be true from the Real. He reminds us that God – Allah – as He really is, is not the same as the God that people may imagine to be, although Allah is not absent from this specific form either Allah is unlimited, but the believer’s imagination, or opinion of God – Allah – is naturally limited.
→ Lâ ilâha illa-LLâh.
As for your concern by those critics who debunk God based in their prepackage idea of God, they do not scape their limited Imagination, with their particular Cosmology, go try tell an Atheist scientist about your experience with the “Mystery” and see what they tell you!
I am an atheist. The most important thing about understanding that God has no attributes, belongs to no concepts and cannot be related to any of the parts of the universe is that God is not only linguistically unreachable, God is also physically and materially nonexistent and metaphysics itself is nonexistent and thus God is nonexistent by any definition of existence a human can grasp. It will always be a mystery because our brains are a) relative b) subjective and c) embedded in the universe and can never understand itself objectively. So, while it is ultimately unknowable and therefore a mystery, there’s no reason to believe ‘anything about it’, while there are lots of reasons to believe in the meticulously researched and logically deduced materialist theories that most accurately predict the future.
First you tell me about your Experience using Religious, and Metaphysical analogies, now you tell me you are a Materialist that doesn’t believe but the objective Universe out there because our brain is part of it.
You being a Materialist that is easy to understand.
But what was all that about: “My ineffable experience”
How can you have an ineffable experience, if you say in your latest comment and again I quote you: “there’s no reason to believe anything about it”
Please tell me more about that ineffable experience, that now seems more like a product of hocus-pocus..?
Also Please read my new post: Science a New Cosmology.
I use metaphors because that’s all we have. I say “there is no reason to believe anything ABOUT it” because it is ineffable, not just linguistically; it is unthinkable and therefore a moot point, it is the very definition of nonsense to believe in something you cannot imagine.
“Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location.” No, words cannot point at it, because all words are metaphors and ultimately flawed. Our understanding of the moon must be internally coherent (logical deduction) and anything we can’t epistemologically think about must be disregarded. God can be epistemologically thought of, but is either incoherent or an absolute other, which, as I just said, is per definition nonsense.
Solipsism is not the only belief that requires a leap of faith into a completely unknowable ontology. Brahman-Atman, Leela and Pantheism are identical to Solipsism in this respect.
What I believe is instead that the mystery, which I experience daily, is the perceived void between the subjective metaphor and the ontological Ding. But since it is absolutely unknowable, I have no indication pointing me in the direction of believing anything else than that the experience is a function of the material structures of energy we have defined coherently and in detail.
I respect your point of not wanting to give it a name, but splitting hairs about semantics for those that do, and consider that by giving it a name you limit it, that is totally your subjective view, and I accept that as well, but by no means believe that to be superior to those that give it a Name. We all have a different qualitative understanding for the same word, that may trigger different responses.
As a self confessed Materialist, and Atheist you are inescapable defined by those terms, that by the nature of semantics are limited as well, and subject to misinterpretations.
If you have an Ineffable Experience, you admit to the Ineffable, and that is the Moon.
Negating that experience in others, or believe yours is superior based in your Ideological Atheism, and Materialism, you are still focusing on the finger, rather than the Moon!
No, I’m only negating the finger-pointing, not the Moon itself. I’m negating the attributes you put on the unattributable. And if you think your subjective opinion can do battle with mine and not lose, then please, explain why deduction is not the most useful method of describing the universe.
Btw, are you German or what’s with the common noun capitalization? (just curious) 🙂
First you have to tell me how you can conciliate declaring yourself to be a Materialist, and an Atheist, just to turn around and declare you have achieved a Metaphysical experience?
I already said that I experience it daily and as I’m trying to explain, the ineffable experience is not metaphysical, because the attribute of the experience belonging to a metaphysical plane cannot be attributed to the unattributable. Atheism means you remove all attributes from God and when stripped of all attributes God becomes simply reality, or existence, or universe, or matter, or energy. I use the term materialist because it represents the belief I hold and that belief is that deduction is the best epistemological key to existence.
I am sorry I forgot Metaphysics it is not associated to a Mystical experience from your Materialistic point of view, what I mean in lack of a Materialistic, and Atheist definition to describe the process of Enlightenment, in what context, medium, vehicle, practice, or whatever you want to name it, you have the experience?
You repeatedly mention daily life, but billions of people go through daily life without claiming such experience.
The vehicle was simply that of learning. I’ve studied by reading books, reading online texts, listening to digital recordings, observing myself and everything else in the world. I’ve not been a member of anything or had a tutor or scripture to rely on. I grew up on a farm in Sweden, went to public school, studied Cognitive sciences, English and Journalism at university. That’s the context. I don’t remember the first time I experienced it and I don’t remember the first time I realized I was experiencing it and I don’t remember the first time I realized what the experience was and how to describe it, because it is ineffable.
So, you mean to tell me one day you woke up and decided you were Enlightened?
With no practice, no context, and no vision, except for your Materialist and Atheistic philosophy, and the books you read?
That is for sure a new one. Alas, if cows could fly!
Look Henrik you seem like a nice guy, but somehow confused, you want to have it both ways, to have your cake, and eat it too, and that is not possible. I got no idea how old are you, but sometimes you sound like a young person, I had been to your blog and there is potentiality in you for Real Spiritual progress, you may look like a Buddha, speak like a Buddha, but if you do not act like a Buddha, you are not a Buddha! And I do not mean disrespect, but you are like a parrot repeating with no Real Wisdom, all talk, no praxis! There is knowledge in books, Wisdom is for you to add, knowledge without Realization, is of little use.
Some years ago I wrote a letter to a friend, and decided to post it a few months ago, you can find it at my blog under the title: Letter to a friend about Montaigne, writing, and other matters.
That apply to you like a charm! Read it, is short, you may benefit, your ego is a little out of hand, you are here to win arguments, and feed your ego, you are not fooling anybody, but yourself. And there cannot be any progress in the Spiritual Path if you do not start to tame the ego, and for that you need a Real Spiritual Discipline, under a competent Master, and many years of hard work, so be diligent.
By the way anything you want to find about me, all you got to do is read my blog. It is short, only have sixteen posts so far.
I am here to serve people in the Path, if you need confidential advice, just let me know, get in contact with me, you are welcome.
And remember Henrik:
The TAO, that is the Real TAO, is no ordinary Tao!
“I got no idea how old are you, but sometimes you sound like a young person”.
I am 27.
“So, you mean to tell me one day you woke up and decided you were Enlightened?”
I’ve never called myself enlightened. I didn’t wake up one day knowing everything after having known nothing the day before.
“Your ego is a little out of hand, you are here to win arguments, and feed your ego, you are not fooling anybody, but yourself.”
I didn’t come here to win an argument, I came here to challenge your words, so that I might learn something, so that I might challenge my beliefs.
“if you do not act like a Buddha, you are not a Buddha”
I’ve never claimed to either be, have been, gonna be or want to be a Buddha.
You also say “you seem like a nice guy, but somehow confused” and “you are like a parrot repeating with no Real Wisdom”.
It’s not often I get so many presumptuous and condescending personal attacks all in one comment.
I’ve read all your posts. In the Montaigne letter post you talk about Western heartless egos, and I assume that’s what you’re referring to when you say “That applies to you like a charm”. Is this your prejudice or do you have quotes from my blog to support all of these accusations?
And remember theburningheart:
Tao/sunyata is a linguistically relative metaphor for the absolute truth, and it is ineffable/empty because the objective reality is unobtainable by subjects.
I remind you of your writing of Nov. 18:
“I experienced the unnameable, the mystery, that which has been metaphorized as the tunder of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the unity behind the duality of yin/yang, the necessary connection of all things related as portrayed in the black dot in the white field and the white dot in the black field, the emptiness, sunyata, of Nagarjuna, the love of Jesus or the Father he describes by saying “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust”, that which is beyond being and not being, beyond neither being nor not being, the transcendence of Leela, the sun God Ra, nirvana, brahman.”
Are those not your words?
I warned you of borrowing terms for your experience with Religious and well known Metaphysical, connotations. Now those are big claims for a person who confess not even a practice of those beliefs, but furthermore that also deny their possibility as valid. Again I quote you: “Tao/sunyata is a linguistically relative metaphor for the absolute truth, and it is ineffable/empty because the objective reality is unobtainable by subjects.” Therefore You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Those last words unobtainable by subjects, what do you think they mean, or imply?
Henrik, it is not my purpose to offend you, but to make you aware that it is not the same reading a book let’s say about Kara-Te, and believe you are already a Black Belt without ever practiced the Art! Sorry, if it hurt your feelings, but if you think I have being tough, wait until you start a Real Practice!And you are right I wish this would challenge your beliefs, otherwise all our conversation is useless.
Please Henrik, rather than borrow my Metaphors, and try to use them against me, be a little original and use your own, I remind you that in the past that have not worked well, or you forgot already the finger pointing to the Moon?
“Unobtainable by subjects” means that a neural network embedded in nature/reality/the universe can only relate phenomena to each other. Everything we experience is relative. You say you experience reality with your heart, that’s your linguistically relative metaphor. The duality of yin and yang, mind and heart and all other dualities are delusions created by the subject to categorize existence so you can build a structure of understanding that fits in your relative neural network. But the universe doesn’t fit inside the subject so because, absolutely, existence can’t be categorized, simplified, generalized and relativized and still be the absolute truth, a subject can only know the subjective experience and not the absolute truth. We have to accept the internally coherently deduced relative truth because the Tao is unobtainable and ineffable and without attributes like “metaphysical”, “life force”,”love” “compassion” et cetera. These attributes do not belong to the unattributable, they belong to the categories of the subjects and are not absolute truths. Love, e.g., is therefore constrained to the rules of the relative universe, the material universe, the logically deduced universe, the tangible universe, the describable universe, the universe in which the word “emotion” is a metaphor for a electrochemical process within a single subject and the emotion “love” not a metaphysical substance that binds subjects together in a metaphysical dimension. Even the word “unattributable” is unattributable to the unattributable, or as Nagarjuna says, even sunyata is sunyata.
I know you knew that, therefore you were lying at saying:
“I have had that experience”
So if you believe that to be impossible, is not true, that you ever experience the ineffable, right?
So have you told that to Eli Jaxon-Bear? 🙂
“So if you believe that to be impossible, is not true, that you ever experience the ineffable, right?”
Is that a question?
Don’t call me a liar. I experience the ineffable daily and trust me, it is not spiritual or metaphysical in any way.
Yes, subjectively! And according to your Materialistic and nihilistic beliefs totally meaningless , and therefore useless! But I do not care about it if you believe you are Clark Kent. I am not claiming that, I am claiming that is not possible to use analogies or metaphors using well know Religious origins dismissing their Cultural, doctrinaire, dogmatic, Historical, Cosmological view of those experiences, that is Cultural Relativism.
And no I do not have a prejudice against you, or Western society in general but when you claim:
“I have had that experience, but I don’t call it God because that sounds like it’s not a metaphor for something else, but a real factual personal God. God implies a Judeo-Christian God, a God as defined by the people of the Levant. That is not what I experienced. I experienced the unnameable, the mystery, that which has been metaphorized as the tunder of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the unity behind the duality of yin/yang, the necessary connection of all things related as portrayed in the black dot in the white field and the white dot in the black field, the emptiness, sunyata, of Nagarjuna, the love of Jesus or the Father he describes by saying “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust”, that which is beyond being and not being, beyond neither being nor not being, the transcendence of Leela, the sun God Ra, nirvana, brahman.”
You are committing a grievous mistake of equaling your experience, to theirs and that is what I am talking about when I said in my post of Letter to a friend about Montaigne, writing, and other matters:
“Which take to my posterior reflection, about the lack of sympathy I feel in regard for many members of the Western intelligentsia who embrace Buddhism, out of their idea that it conforms to our way of thinking, and therefore suits our intellectual proclivities, ”
You cheery pick those metaphors to suit your Materialistic Philosophy, without respecting their true meaning based in their proper context.
But please tell me about Eli Jaxon-Bear, do you know him, what do you think of him, have you expose your beliefs to him?
It is true that I cherry-pick, in the sense that I dismiss all the nonsens of “fire, earth, water and air” and 7 chakras and so on. I’m only using the metaphors to explain that the psychology is no different in their experience than in mine. You are clearly not a materialist and can therefore not accept this, but that is your subjectivity, not mine.
No, I havn’t told Eli Jaxon-Bear. Do you know Nils-Ingvar? Have you told him about your views?
Well, your philosophy is poor if you have to borrow metaphors of Religions, that their original meaning contradict your views that do not belong to it, and what is more there are out of context!
Have I use Nils-Ingvar?
Read my blog and stop being so defensive.
Here we come full circle, you want to convince me of your subjective ideas based in your intellectual understanding of somebody else experience, and that is why you see them similar.
We can’t live by proxy, our experience is unique, and it will never can be exactly the same regardless, this is the ship of Theseus paradox. The whole idea of a Spiritual Practice is to come to the Realization of your own experience, using methods that have been tried in the past and are effective, regardless of your preconceived ideas about them, if you do not have a practice you will never go too far, granted it takes work, and a lot of effort, but for the skeptics, there are easier, but riskier ways; Ayahuasca, Iboga, etc.
You dismiss too easily what you do not know, or doesn’t sound like fit your Cosmology, just to give you an example you said:
“It is true that I cherry-pick, in the sense that I dismiss all the nonsens of “fire, earth, water and air” and 7 chakras and so on.
Over billions of Chinese people have used Acupuncture for over two thousand years, even Chairman Mao, a staunch materialist and an atheist confronted with the need of medics, and medicines for his troops during the Long March, come to the realization that acupuncture was good enough for his troops, and to this day the practice of Acupuncture is alive and well not only in modern Communist China but also in many other places including Western Nations. Well, as you may guess Acupuncture is based on Taoist Cosmology, that to our modern Western understanding may seem unbelivable, in great part based in those same things you arrogantly dismiss as nonsense, here:
“Acupuncture five elements
Chinese philosophy recognizes five distinct elements of cyclical change called water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. These five elements can be related to our four seasons (with a fifth late summer season) as shown in the table below. The elements can also be related to different colors, emotion, taste, voice and various organs. These can also be related to the selection of food and herbs. Notice the correspondence between the Chinese philosophy and the underlying Indian philosophy, which also classifies everything in the universe under earth, water, fire, air, and ether.”
Should I said more?
I posted a comment that is still awaiting moderation.
“the whole idea of a Spiritual Practice is to come to the Realization of your own experience, using methods that have been tried in the past”
That’s a contradiction: “We can only use other people methods to have a unique experience”.
It’s interesting that you bring up acupuncture because acupuncture has been proven fake, it’s pseudo-science, which means it’s all placebo.
I can’t know their experience no, but then again, you can’t know their experience either, you have to make a subjective judgment whether you believe your experience is somewhat like the experience of those who claim attributes like the word “enlightenment” based on your subjective understanding of their subjective experience and their subjective intellectual description to you about it. That means we’re no different you and I when we evaluate our own and others’ experiences and so you can’t use that as a argument against me and not at the same time against yourself. You may think your heart cannot lie to you, but that’s your subjective opinion, but even if it were you have to make a knowledge-based (even if it’s “knowledge of the heart”) decision whether the experienec other people describe to you and which you can only evaluate through their linguistic description of it, then it comes down to who is intellectually better informed about the experience. I am well aware of the effects of Ayahuasca and many other drugs, like DMT, MDMA, mushrooms, LSD, peyote, marijuana, cocaine, heroine, amphetamine, opium, alcohol, tobacco and so on. Not that I have taken all of them, but it’s only the intellectual description of them that matters since we can’t feel what others feel. And regardless of our own experiences, under influence or not, we have to relate those experiences subjectively to the language we share and that’s our only way of making this judgment. I was talking to a scientologist on his blog, it’s in Swedish but I can tell you about it.
He said that billions or trillions of years ago, metaphysical enteties created the universe and eventually got entangled in it and forget who they used to be, obsessed with the material reality in which they started to believe was real. To free yourself and again become master of time and space, you have to pay a lot of money and go to meeting with an auditor, which is like a spiritual master or guide. The auditor has a device which measures electrical resistance of the skin, but claims that it measures spiritual resistance and is used to unblock the mind, free the spirit. At one point the scientologist I was talking to, during one of these therapy sessions, has an out-of-body experience. I said that OOBs are common neurological phenomena, we know what happens in the brain to create these sensations and that it’s an illusion of the brain and you’re not actually a metaphysical soul that ventures outside the physical body, but he had had this experience and so had a lot of other scientologists and therefore scientology is true and ghosts exist and medium are for real and so on and so on. That’s the problem with subjectivity.
Now the problem of Theseus’ ship is just this simplification of the neural network I talked about earlier. We perceive trees and rivers and ships and people and stuff, but these definitions are all approximations made to fit inside the brain. If we did not simplify each brain would have to be larger than the universe, which is by definition impossible. Like Heraclitus said, you can’t step into the same river twice, and the reason is that there never was a river in the first place. The river is just a description of a temporarily stable feature or form of the ever-flowing energy of the universe. The same goes for humans, we’re just temporarily stable complexes and our parts change everyday. A human is just like Theseus’ ship. The ship is a ship only because we define it so. In reality it is just atoms, which in turn are not atoms, but subatomic particles, which in turn are not sub-atomic particles but and so on. Each step higher up on the ladder of concepts is a simplification of the level below. It’s wrong, but it’s all we got. So, it doesn’t matter if we change all the atoms of the ship, the ship is only a ship in our minds regardless of the atoms that make it up. We’re not absolute subjects that bind different temporal forms of matter into a coherent unity. Instead we are produced in every moment and the feeling of coherency, i.e. the idea that we’re still the same as the minute before, comes from the neural network automatically connecting the structurally physical memories in the brain and the new electrochemical activity of the present.
Your whole proposition depends on this words, I quote you:
but even if it were you have to make a knowledge-based (even if it’s “knowledge of the heart”) decision whether the experienec other people describe to you and which you can only evaluate through their linguistic description of it, then it comes down to who is intellectually better informed about the experience.
My response to you rather than judging and try to discriminate with your intellect about it, which since my first response to you I clearly told you:
You could be perfectly content with yourself believing whatever you wish, but your subjective ideas don’t invalidate somebody else experience, that it is not the process of subjective discourse, like I believe the Universe work this way, or that other way, therefore it is impossible for God to exist, or oh, if you were under the influence of Ayahuasca, it is perfectly reasonable to understand that the chemical process in your brain made you believe all this weird stuff! My answer to you is; You try it and experience it, then we argue if your experience was real, or it was just another idea that cross your mind! Either you have experienced God, or you don’t, but if you never have a Mystical experience that open your Heart, all your ideas it is just the chatter box you carry on your head that never stop talking!
Henrik is not about who is intellectually better informed about China or not, is about if you have ever been to China! You dismiss Acupuncture as a fake, you arrogantly negate billions of Chinese experience just because you read somewhere is a fake, rather than rely in someone else account YOU try it!
Go have a shot of Ayahuasca!
We have come full circle, here Henrik, this is for you:
Once, a long time ago, there was a wise Zen master. People from far and near would seek his counsel and ask for his wisdom. Many would come and ask him to teach them, enlighten them in the way of Zen. He seldom turned any away.
One day an important man, a man used to command and obedience came to visit the master. “I have come today to ask you to teach me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.” The tone of the important man’s voice was one used to getting his own way.
The Zen master smiled and said that they should discuss the matter over a cup of tea. When the tea was served the master poured his visitor a cup. He poured and he poured and the tea rose to the rim and began to spill over the table and finally onto the robes of the wealthy man. Finally the visitor shouted, “Enough. You are spilling the tea all over. Can’t you see the cup is full?”
The master stopped pouring and smiled at his guest. “You are like this tea cup, so full that nothing more can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.”
The flaws of anecdotal evidence is exactly what I was pointing at with my reference to the perceived enlightenment of the scientologist. Doesn’t matter how many people claim that acupuncture works for them when all unbiased tests show that it’s just placebo.
And I have had that experience, why do you keep saying I will learn something after I have one when I’ve made it clear I’ve already had the experience. You don’t think it can be achieved by a materialist or without drugs, but that’s a problem of your limited, or perchance even deluded, mind, and not a problem of my limited, and perchance deluded, mind.
Also, I’ve invited you to my tea party (my blog), but you refuse my tea even before tasting it solely because it smells strange to you.
Do not get flustered Henrik!
I have been to your blog and read here, and there.
And what you say about Quantum Physics from a Materialist point of view is sound, I am not opposed to the study of Matter by Science, but ultimately what they have found it is what Hindu Cosmology have been telling us for quite a long time the Universe is Maya, illusion.
The Chinese:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
The Sufis also speak of Creation not only in the past, but as a continuous process, This is what is called the renewal of creation at every instant. At every moment the Universe is absorbed in to the Principle and recreated at every moment, in fact Existence is not a state, but an act, as the Existenciating command of God, “Be”
The Sufis tell us that the
Absolute see Itself on creation like in a mirror, so no wonder if you study the image of the mirror you will only find a reflection that is not the Real.
Most people problems with God arise of trying to find Him, not realizing that in a mirror right is left, and left is right!
In the Spiritual World things are inverse, you do not go looking for God, You do not Realize God.
God Realize Himself in You!
If you only allow it.
Here the Chinese again:
“If you overesteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.
The Master leads
by emptying people’s minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.
Practice not-doing,
and everything will fall into place.”
If you would realize that emptiness that you talk so much about, but seem not to understand, it is precisely what the Mystic strive for. Now, those same guys who give us all that nonsense of Earth, Water, Air, Fire and the seven Chakras come with a brilliant fellow named Patanjali who expose a method of Union (Yoga)
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali tell us:
“Before beginning any spiritual text it is customary to clear the mind of all distracting thoughts, to calm the breath and to purify the heart.
1.1 Now, instruction in Union.
1.2. Union is restraining the thought-streams natural to the mind.
1.3. Then the seer dwells in his own nature.
1.4. Otherwise he is of the same form as the thought-streams.
1.5. The thought-streams are five-fold, painful and not painful.
1.6. Right knowledge, wrong knowledge, fancy, sleep and memory.
1.7. Right knowledge is inference, tradition and genuine cognition.
1.8. Wrong knowledge is false, illusory, erroneous beliefs or notions.
1.9. Fancy is following after word-knowledge empty of substance.
1.10. Deep sleep is the modification of the mind which has for its substratum nothingness.
1.11. Memory is not allowing mental impressions to escape.
1.12. These thought-streams are controlled by practice and non-attachment.
1.13. Practice is the effort to secure steadiness.”
Etc.
Pay attention in particular to 1.2 You have to stop the flow of thought, if you don’t you will never achieve emptiness, in this life, even if emptiness is our true Nature.
But now the emptiness in my stomach is reclaiming me with a need to fill it! Illusion, or not, I obey it’s command, so I go to dinner. 🙂
“The Sufis also speak of Creation not only in the past, but as a continuous process, This is what is called the renewal of creation at every instant.”
If you had actually read my blog you’d see that I talk about that a lot, but very rarely of quantum mechanics. Maya is the real world, the illusion is the subjective experience of Maya. I can accept that God is the inverse of Maya, but if so, then God is just another name for Maya and it would be pointless to talk about God instead of Maya. You talk a lot but you say nothing, just repeating lengthy quotes and not being able to see the whole picture.
Also, it is impossible to stop the flow of thought. When I meditate I am under the illusion that I am not thinking, in actuality I am just thinking of emptiness, I will never get rid of the activity even when I’m not aware of it, evidenced by dreams and the subconscious. The fourth letter of AUM is this same illusion. So are all the experiences of the heart. In reality you are created by the neural network. I know people have wanted to believe in metaphysics for a long time because the discrepancy between the subjective experience of being and the detailed description of the body creates an insurpassable abyss, a mystery, and this lack of understanding leads us to assume that thunder is a force of will, that trees are inhabited by djinns, that the sun is pulled by a God, that the material world is not an explanation, we have to invent the idea of “there’s gotta be something more”, literally “meta-“.
You see Henrik, the problem with label yourself with a ism, or a ist, like in Materliasm, or Atheist, or any other ism for that matter, is that it force you in to dogmas, here you affirm that it is not possible to stop the flow of thought just because under the tenets of your Religion, oh, I am sorry, your Materialism that is impossible.
But let’s see how somebody else not bound by your limitations can see things:
The Universe is absolutely huge, so huge that every possible combination of events that you can imagine inside your head really exists! To give you an example of how the universe is infinite we must look at how the universe branches to infinity on the small side. If I had an apple and made it ½ as large and did this over and over again. There would always be an apple whether its original size was divided down and down ex .5,.25,.125,.0625 and so on. The apple would never disappear because the universe will always accommodate it. We must eliminate human measurements from our head because we have labeled certain sizes terms that make mathematical sense in our mathematical calculations of the universe. What people have failed to realize is that the earth’s circumference is not really 24,902 miles because that it all relative to our idea of size and our measurements. The earth could indeed be .0000024902 cm in the overall scheme of the universe and humans could be .0000000000001 mm at their real height where we have labeled ourselves as perhaps 6 feet tall. Let us imagine a universe with endless possibilities, do not waste time with concepts of dimensions and alternative realities that have been theorized. Simply focus on the term infinite and the concept that infinite is never ending, therefore everything that you can imagine exists. Your mom and dad are being born somewhere zillions of miles away, you are a grandparent, the president of the United States, the emperor of the Chinese dynasty. Somewhere you can even fly if in that given situation and in that given world, physics enable it. Perhaps gravity is far weaker on that earth 9,999,999,999 human measured miles from here in the universe. Back to concept of the ocean and land, just because you cannot see these things does not mean they do not exist. Just because you cannot see those other planets does not mean they do not exist. For example let us look at the moon, humans weigh far less due to gravity and can therefore bounce along while that is not a possibility on our planet due to gravity.
Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/spirituality-articles/the-universe-and-god-with-infinite-possibilities-1040115.html#ixzz17cksXyPk
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
You say:
“Also, it is impossible to stop the flow of thought. When I meditate I am under the illusion that I am not thinking, in actuality I am just thinking of emptiness, I will never get rid of the activity even when I’m not aware of it, evidenced by dreams and the subconscious. The fourth letter of AUM is this same illusion. ”
“My response to you is if the universe is an Illusion, why can’t you have any illusion you may desire? Why you have to add:
So are all the experiences of the heart. In reality you are created by the neural network. I know people have wanted to believe in metaphysics for a long time because the discrepancy between the subjective experience of being and the detailed description of the body creates an insurpassable abyss, a mystery, and this lack of understanding leads us to assume that thunder is a force of will, that trees are inhabited by djinns, that the sun is pulled by a God, that the material world is not an explanation, we have to invent the idea of “there’s gotta be something more”, literally “meta-”.
It is not that your own illusion also? it is not the neural network an illusion as well?
Have a good evening 🙂
“The earth could indeed be .0000024902 cm in the overall scheme of the universe and humans could be .0000000000001 mm at their real height” Yes, but the point about deduction, which I’ve mentioned several times already, is that the relationship is the same regardless of the definition. I actually thought you had some good arguments behind your strong convictions, but it seems you just thought: “space and time is infinite and I have a soul, therefore …”, which is a deduction based on two very weak presuppositions, because a) space is not infinite and b) the soul does not exist.
Space is huge, but not infinite. If you divide an apple enough times you come down to an apple cell, if you divide that cell, is it still an apple? If you divide the cell down to a single hydrogen atom, is that still an apple? If you divide that atom, is it still an apple? When does the apple become a human if you eat the apple atoms?
The soul does not exist. Like all language, the soul is a metaphysical simplification of a complex process. Just because it’s difficult to understand the discrepancy between our “experience” and our experience of our experiencers (the body) (i.e. between the experience and the being) doesn’t mean it’s sound to say it’s gotta be magic.
Also, even if the idea of infinite space was true, lets say that the billions of galaxies we today believe is what makes up the universe are actually just a quark in a larger existence and the reason we can’t see other quarks (other collections of billions of galaxies) is because quarks are so far apart and don’t have a noticeble effect on each other. Thus, this quark might very well be a part of a giant apple or any other structure. Now, even if this was true, why should we believe it? Nothing in the power of the human can justify this belief. There’s no thinkable reason to believe it, (your arguments are indeed very poor). No delusional “emotional reason” to believe it. No evidence either by measurement or inference can be produced. So even if it was the truth, it would be foolish to believe in it.
I only use -isms to spark debate, my arguments are not based on -isms. If someone offers a more likely explanation of the universe that doesn’t fit with the acceptable definition of e.g. materialism, I will either propose that our understanding of matter be changed or if that is not logically or consensually possible reject materialism.
“Why can’t you have any illusion you may desire?” Because we’re not metaphysical. The illusion is caused by the structuralization of matter.
I confess that I choose this article to see if you would catch this one! Actually I agree partially with you Jamison Fisher makes the crass mistake of equating the Universe with God in a Pantheistic fashion, forgetting that the Universe is finite. As for when an apple stop being an apple at the level of the atom, it is not important, before it was an apple, it was an atom of something else, that you eat the apple will be just like the Earth In about 5 billion years, the Sun will have used up its hydrogen reserves and will expand to become a Red Giant, with a radius of about Earth’s orbital distance. The Earth will most likely be swallowed up when this occurs, so the apple! but It is not the apple that should concern you, but the lack of Ontological Reality (Maya) of the apple, the atom of the apple, the Earth, the Sun, and the Universe itself!
Yes, I read your: An Arbitrary Theory of Creation, but honestly find them, semantically contrived, painfully tortuous to follow, the nearest to the truth of the matter is when you resume and say:
” In actuality, nobody knows the nature of water. But we are finite and therefore need to/do believe that we know.”
And you could have said that with a lot less words.
Yes, but the implications of our lack of knowledge is the interesting part. To say that we don’t know is far from a resumé, it’s merely the prologue. We can’t just say “I have no clue” and be done with it, and even worse would be to say “I have no clue, therefore metaphysics is real.” Subsequent conclusions come from the same question that Descartes answered with “Cogito ergo sum”, namely: What can I know? My answer is that you can’t know the absolute nature of anything. Ultimately nothing exists. But we have dependent-arising, meaning relativity, and we can judge the relative (internal) coherence of a world-view. Thus, in the end, we can’t even speculate about the ultimate nature of things, we can only think of/have to accept the deduced description of the world.
I’m sorry if it’s torture to you, my short-comings as a writer does not affect the quality of my philosophy though.
In the House build by the materials of Illusion whose inhabitant is more deluded?
When you say:
We can’t just say “I have no clue” and be done with it, and even worse would be to say “I have no clue, therefore metaphysics is real.”
Why not?
Should I deny my experience, on the base of your subjective supposition that matter is all we got, and become like the King of the poisoned well, just to make you happy?
“We don’t know” -> Conclusion: “Metaphysics is real.” You truly don’t understand why this is impossible to say? I don’t know if there’s an apple in my hand, therefore there is a spider in my hand, necessarily and without doubt a spider. I don’t have a clue whether it’s an apple or not, whether it’s something else or not, therefore IT MUST BE A SPIDER! “I don’t know, therefore metaphysics is real”.
The point about deduction is not only that we must reduce our knowledge to unprovable deduction, but that this is necessarily what we must build our knowledge on. We can accept that we have no ultimate knowledge of course and say “I don’t know if I exist, I don’t know if you exist, I don’t know if God exists, I don’t know if if anything exists, I don’t know if eating will keep me alive, I don’t know if there is water in my body, I don’t know if there’s any point in drinking water, I don’t know how babies are made, I don’t know et cetera,” which is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t seem very usable. And we can’t get rid of deduction even if we did arrive at that conclusion, because we arrive at that conclusion through deduction of our knowledge. We use deduction to evaluate the idea that “we can’t know anything”, we came to this conclusion through deducing our experiences of the world. The problem of deduction is that the premises are absolutely unknowable, but the strength of deduction is that we can evaluate the internal coherency of ideas. And this is the relationship we inescapably build our knowledge with, no matter what delusional concepts are invented to circumvent this realization.
In a house of illusion, the people who understand the laws of the illusion will be able to navigate through it. If the laws of illusion are sometimes altered by anyone or anything, the people who understand that one or that thing will understand how the laws change and thus fare best. If the laws of the illusion are constant, then there either is no thing or one to alter them or the thing or one is itself part of the laws or the laws themselves and therefore a superfluous element in the understanding of the house, which then is the entirety of existence and includes thing like love and bliss and consciousness and everything, at least to the person who understands that the house houses it-all.
I’m not trying to convince you to just make me happy, I also want to share my thoughts with you and I want to explore my own thoughts and I want to explore language and I want a bunch of other stuff besides becoming happy through your conversion, which is far from a top priority of mine.
I’m not denying your experience, I’m explaining the experience. If you think I am mad, then what’s to say you aren’t the one who’s drunk mad?
Cervantes taught us there is madness that can be sublime, In India the Babas, mad people to our Western eyes, people just call them God Intoxicated, not as mockery, but as a sign of respect, if you argue with a mad man who is the fool? As to who would fare best will always be subjective, and therefore relative.
Meanwhile you reduce existence at a long series of I don’t knows, and look for enlightenment in the workings of matter , always changing and voluble and dependent to a new discoveries, new hypothesis, photons, a new particle, or distant quarks, and black holes, somewhere in outer space, and dream of building science fiction technology like connecting your brain to a giant machine, not an original idea, and in my subjective judgment not a good one either, and to explore the Universe it in a future still not existent, the outer realms of it, that is your privilege, and if it brings you joy, even better, meanwhile we suffer today the backlash of lesser technology, product of that knowledge, and the irresponsibility of those who menace not only us, but every other creature on Earth.
I understand the materialist position of consciousness to be a byproduct of matter, but then there is Wisdom in matter, which would mean a sort of consciousness, self awareness, a guiding Principle, that current scientist deny and attribute to chance, the laws of physics, time etc. And if pressed at all, some begrudgingly concede to name it a mystery not unveiled yet. This estate of affairs in contemporary Science reduce Men to a common lower denominator, a throw of the dice of a nihilistic, and purposeless existence, this is contrary to my experience, of life existence as a precious, and meaningful. On your views this wouldn’t mater, I guess, it just will be a chemical reaction in my brain. Maybe the common Man one day would be able to realize Truth through science, I do not deny that possibility, but in any case still would be a subjective experience, in the individual, and very likely not different of Mystical experience were the vehicle for it, is not the mind, or the facts out there, but the Heart.
But unlike you, others before, and in the present as myself, have chosen a different way, I am unconstrained either by an Scholastic necessity to conform , or an Academic prestige to keep, that free me to speak my mind openly, and without restrains, without the fear of burning up my reputation, like E.F. Schumacher that gave her daughter the book that will be his testament in his deathbed “A Guide for the Perplex” no doubt to escape criticism. When Religions talk about different levels of Being, is anathema, or just nonsense, when theoretical Physicists talk about different dimensions, and all sorts of things, with little compunction. Advaita Vedanta speaks of three levels of Truth.
The transcendental or the Pāramārthika level in which Brahman is the only reality and nothing else;
The pragmatic or the Vyāvahārika level in which both Jiva (living creatures or individual souls) and Iswara are true; here, the material world is also true, and,
The apparent or the Prāthibhāsika level in which material world reality is actually false, like illusion of a snake over a rope or a dream.
The third school of Vedanta philosophy is the school of Advaita Vedanta. In this, the only reality that exists is Brahman. This does not mean that the world does not exist, but that it has a lower level of reality. In Advaita Vedanta philosophy, the world exists, but it exists with only ambiguous reality, and it exists with Brahman at its root. Hence the true reality of the world is Brahman and the reality that we see around us is a false reality, an ambiguous reality. So the world is really Brahman, that which is not Brahman has only relative reality and is to be disregarded.
Brahman is the only truth, the world is an illusion, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and individual self.
If I am mad so be it, unlike a young atheist that exclaimed that he was so sure of his beliefs, that if he by any chance would experience a Mystical experience, he would run and check himself in to a clinic for the mentally disabled, I have no reason to distrust my experience, there is no two.
I know by my experience that the Absolute, the Immanent, the whole of Creation, the great Mystery exist within me, and my Heart is the Axis of the Visible, and the Invisible, the Ultimate Reality, and this is not a random chance, but the whole purpose of Existence, and not only this allows me to experience truth, consciousness, and bliss, within myself, but It’s reflected Light in the Mercy, Love, Beauty, and meaning of everything, in the objective, as well in the subjective. God, Brahman, Allah, or the Mystery, or by any other Name /or no Name is within me, and allow me to see It in everything, including the sensible as the only Reality. TAT TVAM ASI
Look, you have to open your mind a lot more to be able to comprehend how all the experiences that are almost unfathomably strange to you are all caused by the nature of reality. I call it material because the material description is the most accurate one, but you can call it something else as long as you use the definition applied to matter. How can you apply neurochemical reactions of the human brain like love, bliss, consciousness, mercy and beauty to Brahman who has neither a human brain nor thinks using neurochemical reactions? If you opened your mind to a world that was not like a human you would see wonderful things, but you’re stuck in an anthropocentric world-view where everything revolves around humans. But that’s fine, I’m sure you’re happy in your little world of delusion, my main point though is that there is no additional, no meta, no super, no extra, no something more, no purpose, no meaning, no reason, no point, no goal; It just is.
Your mistake is to believe you are different than Brahman.
What about opening your mind to that?
“Trying to debate the existence of God, based in an intellectual idea of God as a separate entity outside of us who may, or not exist it is one example of how deep we have walked in such nonsense!”
Perfect.
I miss you, dow! Hopefully, I will be seeing you on Saturday.
“You must strike the soft underbelly!” 🙂
And yet it is all of no value. If you are religious, you understand reality to be an illusion, a shadow of the truth, if you are not, you understand reality to be transcendent. I criticize the beliefs of no one, I accept the beliefs of no one. I wish to liberate the multitude of sentient beings. Why. The sentient beings are unimportant, hence they have the highest value. Reality is an illusion hence it is truth. I do not understand the nature of things, but he who understands and sees clearly, is he not a great sage? As for me, my mission is to toil for the good of all. If there is a heaven, this knowledge would have no implications for me. I for aiding all beings to enlightenment I am rewarded with heaven, I will continue, If said actions shall condemn me to hell, I shall do them. If any man or god should tell me to hurt an innocent, I will defy them, if any man or god tells me to aid an innocent I shall do so as of my own will. I care not what a man believes so long as he embraces justice, love and benevolence. So long as he follows the moral law. To me, all else is of no value. The highest meaning of life is to show infinite compassion to all else that share this experienced of life. The why is unimportant, rather this is a means unto its own end.
What you say is a noble gesture, yet love presuppose not love, justice, injustice, benevolence, non benevolence Transcendence; Immanence etc. There is no two, therefore there is nothing to protect, and nothing to save, and no need to liberate, or for Infinite compassion. There is no end, and therefore no need of means to accomplish it.
I want to isolate one point first, about Sartre. I disagree with his dictum, at least s you have stated it, that we have no essence and therefore existence preceeds it. Unsure whether he merely stipulates this as foundational or works up rhetoric to ‘prove’ it, but mys expereince is diametrically otherwise: I do have essence. And it does preceed at least my current existence as my present earthly personality.
About athiesm per se, I’ve had too many discussions, most of them not particualarly leading to greater mutual understanding. I will say two things about it in general. First, I almost never meet an authentic athiest who is not also philosophically a materialist, at bottom, when you peel away the layers of often unexamined assumptions. This foundational materialism can never be a result of empirical investigation; it always is either a belief or a preference, often quite dogmatic. So usually I have found myself in the position of trying to force the athiest interlocutor to realize and admit this unexamined belief at the root of his thought edifice. With varying degrees of success. Once seen, the athiest is then logically obliged to demonstrate why and how he believes that all currently experienced phenomena has somehow arisen out of pure material without the intention of any external agency. Most think ‘science’ accomplishes this demonstration, but it does not even come close when actually scrutinized.
THe second point is related. Athiests contend, usually, against religious models of creator Gods. These too are for the most part very poorly fleshed out, and reliant upon some very institutionalized versions of scriptural interpretation, almost alwyas inhereited, not individually worked through. So — we have a feverish battle between two camps who do not, generally speaking, ever both to get personally rigorous about the roots of their positions. Which screams emotional attachment to their stance, not clarity about them.
There exist near and far questions in life. God existence is an extremely far one. Many nearer questions need to be worked upon in earnest, individually, first before hoping to sensibly approach a far one.
Well, about Sartre thoughts, he no longer is here to answer us, maybe if you dig his works you may be able to see his argument better, but don’t think its necessary, I mean his example of the paper knife was not exactly a good one. I mean what more design you want but to come with the idea you need a tool to open letters, before you made one?
Yes, philosophical materialism, and the many teachers who you go through at school, if great Science teachers, lousy in knowledge, about almost anything else!
Watch almost any debate were atheist physicist argue against a well prepared Dr. on Philosophy, Theologian, or other, and one thing it will be clear to you, the scientist may know a lot on their field, but almost nothing, about what the other person is talking about, to the point sometimes is embarrassing, but then you read the comments at the video and you find, most people saying the philosopher or, the theologian was saying a lot of incomprehensible stuff, simply put they could not grasp either a single thing he was saying, and believe the scientist did his job discrediting the other.
Sad, but that is the problem we face in a World, when to be an specialist, it means someone who knows a lot, about very little, they cannot see the forest for the trees.
Thank you for your comment, we appreciate it.
You are right, they are making the situation in the world much worst, when people don’t believe there is a God we have more crime
Thank you for your comment Denise. 🙂