warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Well, no, you need to know what it is before you understand it. But that's kind of a tautology, right?
I was just saying that you don't need to see something in order to understand it fully.
Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Free Will
- Thread starter Linkman226
- Start date
Well, no, you need to know what it is before you understand it. But that's kind of a tautology, right?
I was just saying that you don't need to see something in order to understand it fully.
Like most things, an objective view/evaluation/description of something can be severely limiting to actually understanding it. In a different fashion, immersion in or experiencing things can lead to a very biased and yet truer picture of things.
Sex is a good example. An objective understanding of it and its physical aspects will not create the same kind of understanding that participation does. But once someone participates, it will forever color their objectivity.
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
If you want to understand how it works, you analyze it.
If you want to understand how it feels, you participate in it.
Two different things BirdJaguar.
We cannot process 4D shapes in the same part of the brain that manages perspective, but we can fully model and reason about the behavior of 4D shapes. Any question you may ask about them could be answered definitively, excepting those of sensation, such as what a 4D shape would feel like if we could feel it.Yes, exactly, we can reason about it, but if we lived on a plane (ie in a 2dimensional world/environment) then we would not see the sphrere as it is seen by us now, since we would be seing it in a way relative to how it entered our plane, for example if it sunk vertically on our plane we would be seing first of all only a point, which then would be progressively expanded to a circle, then started decreasing again in circumferance until it became a point once more, then dissappeared completely (at which moment the sphrere would entirely be below our plane).
Likewise we cannot see a 4d form now. Not directly. Only through geometrical and other calculations can we define to a degree how the 4d shape would be.
ps: in fact, in my view, we can do more than that. But we can never actually view the 4d shape as fully as if it was in 3d or less.
By extension the same should be possible to say about God. Questions about the nature of God should have articulable answers, just like questions about any other concrete thing..
Knowing something is tied to being able to explain it. If you cannot explain it, how do you know you know it? It's possible for something to seem to make sense, but under scrutiny and hindsight makes no sense what so ever. Being drunk or tired in particular may cause this. So in order to say that we consciously know something we must be able to articulate it in some language.
Sensations may be hard to describe, but behavior and properties of the physical world should not be.
You may have a different experience of what you feel, but the properties of a phenomena or object would be the same from person to person. God is not a sensation by any definition.
Of course, but they can lead to very different conclusions about the nature of things and what is true.
How do you know? Becouse the thing you are experiencing or examining carries in it power. Something which influences our practical reality.
How are you going to explain love? We know its one of the most important things in our lives. Our lives are constant interchange of love and under scrutiny you may be able to say that there is some chemical reaction going on in the brain or that there is this molecule influencing another one but if you tell someone this I dont think he will have a good idea what love is. He will have to experience it first. No matter what kind of intellectual language you use you will fail to explain it. And mind you we are just talking about something so common as human love. Even if you use poetic language and poetical inteligence you can always get couple of hints but not the reality itself.
So knowing something without capacity to explain it is fairly common human experience.
We know fair bit about physical reality since it is the easiest plain of existence for us to examine. But we are also vital and mental beings and in a sense much more that then just purely physical beings. Otherwise it would be impossible for anybody to take his life if only the physical survival was our only end.
When it comes to God I dont see how I could object if someone would describe It as Love, Peace or Bliss. It would seem to me that all these pov are more closer to truth then saying that there is something which is not God.
Some people had something called "personal god", though. That means they were of the view that deeper parts of their mental world could be seen as a sort of god, which obviously would be personal, and not the same as for any other person. I think this way of thinking is not good either, though, because you then replace one term (eg unconscious totality) with another (eg god), and it seems to not have any positive significance warranting being used.
If we are only looking for something vastly more complicated than our own consciousness, though, that something already exists, in our own world of thought which is not conscious to us. The latter is highly unlikely to be aware that we exist as its summit, though, ie as humans in a material world. In fact it cannot be spoken of in terms like that, given that it is not a human, but a mental mechanism of extreme complexity. A bit like saying a human cell actually "wills" to do this and that, just because we, the human, can will something.
If we are only looking for something vastly more complicated than our own consciousness, though, that something already exists, in our own world of thought which is not conscious to us. The latter is highly unlikely to be aware that we exist as its summit, though, ie as humans in a material world. In fact it cannot be spoken of in terms like that, given that it is not a human, but a mental mechanism of extreme complexity. A bit like saying a human cell actually "wills" to do this and that, just because we, the human, can will something.
There is difference between ones wider being which may include ones unconscious and subconscious reality and ones mental world which in its lowest part is part of that too but in its higher reality is infact superconscious and personal godhead which in its greatest form represent ones absolute height and depth transcending any limitation.
All I can say is that my brain cells are a bit pissed at me right now
They would be, if they had any way of knowing you exist 
A bit (not utterly) like your computer knowing that something makes it calculate the stuff it is made to calculate.
As for your first sentence in the above post, it reminds me a bit of the "Poincare system of symmetries", which is basically a system with 10 variables, instead of the 3 or 4 in the euclidic system. It is a plane (3 dimensions are in the plane) and two cones, both inverted in regards to the plane, and a mirror image of each other.
Of course, in that system, the cones represent Time (past and future). But it could be used to represent any other variable, such as "lower" and "higher" mental worlds, i guess (but i do not think those notions of lower and higher mental world are useful).
A bit (not utterly) like your computer knowing that something makes it calculate the stuff it is made to calculate.As for your first sentence in the above post, it reminds me a bit of the "Poincare system of symmetries", which is basically a system with 10 variables, instead of the 3 or 4 in the euclidic system. It is a plane (3 dimensions are in the plane) and two cones, both inverted in regards to the plane, and a mirror image of each other.
Of course, in that system, the cones represent Time (past and future). But it could be used to represent any other variable, such as "lower" and "higher" mental worlds, i guess (but i do not think those notions of lower and higher mental world are useful).
Yes but when I think of PV of being a source I think of it in an absolute sense not in methaphorical, poetic or in any way partial sense. Why? Becouse that which is manifest from PV is that which already exist (perhaps in some other form) within the PV. So if we can observe human consciousness it only means some form of consciousness is present within the PV. I would go even further and say that PV is in fact pure consciousness and that which we see manifested as inconscious (matter) is only "inverted" form of consciousness which in process of evolution has as by a miracle reverted in part into its true form - consciousness.
If there was no need for potency what would be the purpose of/for manifestation?
I think of the primal void (PV) that way too - with the caveat that we live in the opposite end of the manifestation spectrum, so what looks like a PV to us may not actually be the true PV but just a relatively subtle form of manifestation. A manifestation 'exists' as a possibility within the PV; at this initial stage it has no distinct form, no actuality, and it requires a process of limitation (exclusion of other possibilities) to become actualised. Even an idea of something is a subtle manifestation of it.
Human consciousness exists as a possibility in the PV, but so does non-consciousness. It's interesting that you say that the PV is pure consciousness, because I have arrived at the same idea in an opposite way: rather than the PV being pure consciousness, I have come to believe that pure consciousness is actually Emptiness (i.e. of the PV). If you take away all of the features of regular human consciousness (sensory stimuli, memory, thinking, sense of self) one-by-one then you arrive at the essence of awareness, which is like a blank screen or an empty space. It is precisely because pure consciousness is emptiness that it can accommodate all the aforementioned features of consciousness. The implications of this are that 1) what we call "unconsciousness" is actually consciousness in pure form, and 2) modern science will never work out how the brain generates consciousness because the brain doesn't generate consciousness, because consciousness is a no-thing and science is looking for a thing. The brain is a sophisticated tool for utilising emptiness. Once again I feel compelled to quote from the Tao te Ching: "We work with being, but non-being is what we use." What we call unconscious matter is actually imbued with the 'seed' of pure consciousness, but evidently lacks the machinery (i.e. a suitable limitation complex) to utilise that seed in a way that creates any kind of self-awareness.
"Purpose" is another anthropomorphic construct which has arisen in the context of human evolution. "Purpose" evolved because 1) it gave humans a survival and reproductive advantage in their environment, and 2) as human mental capacity increased people became capable of increasingly abstract thought as an unintended consequence, and humans in turn found uses for that unintended consequence and thus promoted its further development (kind of like how electric eels have evolved to be able to give off such massive jolts of electricity). So while the earliest human notions of purposes would have been practical and immediate - e.g. finding food, having children - notions of purpose have evolved to become more diverse, abstract and sophisticated.
Like potency, purpose only makes sense when their is a concept of self and a distinction between self and other. The PV lacks these qualities: if you ask why the PV causes manifestation, it's because the PV is a sea of infinite possibility which continuously and spontaneously bursts forth with those possibilities. Or to put it another way, the answer to the question of why manifestations occur is "why not?"
Yes I agree, especially with what you say about human thought. It is interesting though to look closely at this 'me' whose existence seems so obvious at first glance...
I don't think that there was a first chronological point of existence, but I suspect their are ontologically prior steps to our level of existence, and that the 7 Days of creation in Genesis are actually a description of these ontological stages (and not a chronological description of the beginning of the world). Perhaps the process of things coming into manifestation/existence could be described as asymptotic, in that (at least from a human perspective) you can always uncover a more subtle layer of existence behind the one you thought was the absolute beginning of all existence, you can always get closer to an absolute first point but never actually reach it? Perhaps the distinction between "existence" and "non-existence" breaks down altogether if you go high enough up the asymptote?
As to the question of why anything exists, I do sincerely think that the best answer to that question is "why not?"
I think it can be healthy to look for a god, provided you do it the right way. I think that genuine mysticism is about using "god" as an intellectual/psychological tool for obtaining a deeper connection to reality. Like all tools its very usefulness is inextricably linked to its capacity to eventually render itself useless; there's no need to keep holding the hammer once you've already nailed it. You are therefore right imo to say that mysticism may destroy itself along with the mystic - because that is the ultimate point of it. But is self-destruction necessarily and always a bad thing?
I think it hugely depends on how the notable change is defined and also felt. It is one thing to arrive from one state of balance, to a next state of balance, the next one having some different (hopefully 'better' ) characteristics as well. It is another to get sucked into some sort of mental vortex, and pretty much get altered beyond recognition. Some people who were involved in esoteric studies, happened to ruin themselves utterly.
In my view it is far safer and more productive to just evolve in the most natural possible way, which seems to be in tautology with the negation of focusing on such "points of no return". It is often claimed that a working memory is the guardian of logic. The Greek term for "truth" even arguably means "lack of oblivion" (aletheia, non-lethe).
In my view it is far safer and more productive to just evolve in the most natural possible way, which seems to be in tautology with the negation of focusing on such "points of no return". It is often claimed that a working memory is the guardian of logic. The Greek term for "truth" even arguably means "lack of oblivion" (aletheia, non-lethe).
O.K. But manifestation occures on certain lines, doesnt it? The natural laws you can see all around are proof of an existing purpose. You dont need laws if your goal is only spontaneity and continuous outburst of infinite possibilities....
So in this instance anthropomorphic construct seem to be reflection of some grasped truth from within the lifes enviroment.
"Only one who is ready to risk all is worthy to win all."
I think its a bit like explorers who went to North pole or attempted to cross Australia etc. There is a great risk but these pioneers are willing to sacrifices their life or pay high price so that whole of humanity can eventually profit from their endeavour. Thats how often progress is made and these pioneers deserve recognition. Needless to say that its always matter of few "crazy" enough individuals who pave the road which if found save is eventualy used by the rest of humanity. In this light both Buddha or Jesus are pretty much just a freaks of Nature.
Those laws are part and parcel of our cosmos; they are not separate from or beyond it. They evolve in the early/primal stages of the cosmos and are really more like ingrained habits of behaviour than actual laws that have been set down.
Different cosmii/manifestation events will have their own set of natural laws. Some will be like our cosmos, in that they will just happen to evolve a sufficiently coherent and sophisticated set of laws/limits to support a durable manifestation event with complex features such as planets and life. Others will just happen to evolve a set of limits which either prevents them from developing higher levels of complexity or causes them to unravel altogether in relatively short order. The boundless sea of possibility offered by the PV allows for infinite permutations and combinations of limits to experiment with. Presumably the only law that all cosmii would obey is the fundamental principle of limitation, i.e. other possibilities must be shut out in order to bring one particular possibility (or set of possibilities) into manifest actuality.
I agree the mystical path is risky, but like many risky endeavours it offers a high return. Not just for the mystic him or herself, but for humanity as a whole.
Is gravitation a habit? Whats the difference between ingrained habit and law that has been set down? If something is ingrained it may as well mean its pretty well settled down, right? When some specie developes special capacity is it the actual specie who develops it or some inteligence behind the evolution? Is that inteligence trying to develope different species in harmony (ecological balance). I think so. But to do that you need laws not just habits. But again once you admit existence of a law then you are facing the question of purpose.
Speaking of an anthropomorphic construct....
