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kosmo
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 111
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 Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 7:19 pm Post subject: Is God Real? |
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Is God Real?
When it comes to spiritual realities, the fact that when you are in a meditative state of oneness, a G-spot might light up (or whatever brain correlate is being tracked), says absolutely nothing about the ontological status of the referent in that state. Any G-spot activity in the brain is the correlate of a meditative state, not its content. When I look at an apple, an area in the brain associated with its perception lights up, but we do not therefore assume that the apple exists only in the brain. So why should we assume that God exists only in the brain because the same thing happens?
When a state or stage of consciousness is activated in the Upper Left Quadrant (see table below: UL), there is a corresponding brain state that is activated in the UR. Consciousness (UL) itself often has signs that indicate referents. The ontological status of those referents is determined by various means, the most common of which is a collective reality check. For example, I see my dog Isaac, which also lights up certain areas of my brain. That is, while that UL-consciousness state is occurring, there is a UR-brain state simultaneously occurring (each event has correlates in all four quadrants). I might want to convey the fact that my dog is here, so I say, "Come and see my dog Isaac." There are 4 things involved here: signs, signifiers, signifieds, and referent.
The actual words "dog" and "Isaac" are signs that have two components, signifiers and signified. The signifiers are the material words or sounds: "dog" and "Isaac". What comes to mind when you hear or see a word such as "dog" is the signified. Isaac the actual dog is the referent. If you come and look and you also see Isaac, we generally assume that the referent, Isaac, is real and not just imagined or hallucinated. So in this case, the signifier "Isaac" has a real referent.
Now, what if I say, talking to my friend, "Do you think Sally loves me?" Those signifiers seem simple enough, but they actually involve being able to take a 3rd-person perspective to see the realities involved. So the referents of those signs exist only in a worldspace of orange or higher (see second table below). You simply cannot see what that sentence means until then, even though you can see the sensorimotor words and material bodies involved. So even though you can hear and see the signifiers in that sentence, you cannot get the correct signified, nor therefore can you see the actual referent. I can see the words, but their meaning is "over my head", and I will simply assume that the referent doesn't exist at all, because I can find no evidence for it whatsoever anywhere I look.
That is something developmentalists have known all along: there isn't a single pregiven world lying around out there waiting for all and sundry to see. Different phenomenological worlds -real worlds- come into being with each new level of consciousness development. Systems theory, for example, which comes into existence around turquoise, simply cannot be seen by orange (or lower) levels of consciousness - global systems are simply "over its head". Those systems exist, they just can't be seen or brought forth until turquoise. So the signifier "globally mutually interacting systems" does not appear real until turquoise, at which point the signifier will call up the correct signified and the actual referent will be seen and understood.
That is the reason that structuralism (and then poststructuralism) was central to the whole "constructivist" revolution in epistemology. There isn't the world of "naive empiricism" just lying around out there waiting to be seen. Naive empiricism itself doesn't exist until orange! Different worlds are brought forth by the structures of consciousness doing the perceiving and co-creating. In All Quadrants All Lines (AQAL), these "constructing structures" are anchored in all 4 quadrants (including the Right-Hand or "objective" quadrants), so this never degenerates into the extreme "social construction" of all realities. But a central fact does remain: the referents of all signifiers exist only at certain developmental stages and states.
So, take the signifiers "God", "Emptiness", and "nirvikalpa samadhi". Are their referents "real"? Do they exist? And the only possible answer: get into the stage or state from which the sentence is being written, and then look for yourself. If you are not in the same state/stage as the author of the signifiers, then you will never have the correct signified, and hence the actual referent cannot be seen. It's "over my head".
On the other hand, the virtually unanimous conclusion of those who bring awareness to, for example, the causal state, is that the signifier "Emptiness" has a real referent. The conclusion of those who stably bring awareness to the nondual state is that the signifier "Godhead" has a real referent. And so on. When the G-spot lights up in those cases, you are seeing something just as real as the apple that lights up other parts of the brain.
But without the correct training in states and stages, "Godhead" and "nirvikalpa" and "Buddha-nature" and "Christ-consciousness" and "nirguna Brahman" and "metanoia" will remain all Greek to you, they will have no real referent or meaning for you. In that case, when a meditator lights up the G-spot, you just won't be able to see what they are seeing, and so you will be forced to assume that it's all "just in the brain".
Silly you. In the meantime, brain-state research like this is quickly being slotted into the scientific materialistic view of things, with the unfortunate result that it probably hurts spirituality more than it helps. But it's absolutely crucial research and most certainly needs to go forward.
A quadratic view allows us to acknowledge and include that very important brain research in the UR, but also let's understand the fundamental rule of any reality check: if I want to know if something is real, I must get in the same state or stage from which the assertion was issued, and then look. If I don't do that, then please, I shouldn't talk about things that are over my head.
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Levels of Consciousness continued
Last edited by kosmo on Sun Jun 24, 2007 8:54 am; edited 1 time in total |
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kosmo
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 111
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| Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 7:39 pm Post subject: |
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The second table above is fairly self explanatory. Here's some explanation for the first.
Integral Methodological Pluralism (IMP) involves, among other things, at least 8 fundamental and apparently irreducible methodologies, injunctions, or paradigms for gaining reproducible knowledge (or verifiably repeatable experiences). The fundamental claim of All Quadrants All Levels (AQAL) Integral Theory is that any approach that leaves out any of these 8 paradigms is a less-than-adequate approach according to available and reliable human knowledge at this time.
The easiest way to understand IMP is to start with what are known as the quadrants, which suggest that any occasion possesses an inside and an outside, as well as an individual and a collective, dimension. Taken together, this gives us the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective. These are often represented as I, you/we, it and its (a variation on 1st, 2nd, 3rd-person pronouns; another variation is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; or art, morals, and science, and so on - namely, the objective truth of exterior science, or it/its; the subjective truth of aesthetics, or I; and the collective truth of ethics, or thou/we).
The table above is a schematic of some of the phenomena found in the quadrants according to reliable knowledge communities working with them.*
We often refer to any event as a holon - a "whole/part", or a whole that is part of other wholes - and thus each of the items labeled in the various quadrants can also be referred to as a holon (e.g., in the UR quadrant, a molecule is a holon that contains atoms and is contained by whole cells; in the UL, a concept is a holon that contains whole symbols and is contained by whole rules, and so on).
Now here, as they say, is where it gets interesting. If you imagine any of the phenomena (or holons) in the various quadrants, you can look at them from their own inside or outside. This gives you 8 primordial perspectives - the inside and the outside view of a holon in any of the 4 quadrants.
We inhabit these 8 spaces, these zones, these lifeworlds, as practical realities. Each of these zones is not just a perspective, but an action, an injunction, a concrete set of actions in a real world zone. Each injunction brings forth or discloses the phenomena that are apprehended through the various perspectives. It is not that perspectives come first and actions or injunctions come later; they simultaneously co-arise (actually, tetra-arise). "Perspectives" simply locate the perceiving holon in AQAL space. To take such-and-such a perspective is to be arising in this particular area of the AQAL matrix.
*As introductory statements we say things like, "The quadrants are the inside and the outside view (or perspective) of the individual and the collective." More technically, with reference to these perspectives, we differentiate between the "view through" and the "view from". All individual (or sentient) holons HAVE or POSSESS 4 perspectives through which or with which they view or touch the world, and those are the quadrants (the view through). But anything can be looked at FROM those 4 perspectives - or the view of anything from those perspectives - and that is technically called a quadrivium.
For example, a chair, as an artifact, does not possess 4 quadrants, but it can be looked at from those 4 quadrants or perspectives, which is then a quadrivium of views of or about the chair. An individual holon (like you or me) has an I, we, it, and its dimension-perspective (and hence a view through); an artifact does not, but we can look at the artifact from each of those perspectives or each quadrivium. |
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Militant Kafir
Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 1714
Location: land of blasphemy
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| Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 8:37 pm Post subject: |
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this post seems to have some meaningful content, but right from the beginning is impossible to understand!
"meditative state of oneness, a G-spot might light up (or whatever brain correlate is being tracked)"
what is "meditative state of oneness"?
what is a "G-spot"?
what is a "brain correlate" and how you track it?
do i need a university degree in meditation to understand this, in my ignorant opinion, babble?
_________________
an image is worth 1000 words:
http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/extreme_mohammed/
"billions of flies eat manure, billions of flies can’t be wrong." Ole Nydahl, budhist Lama thoughts on islam. |
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kosmo
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 111
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| Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 11:32 pm Post subject: |
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MK,
I'm afraid conciseness has given way to misunderstanding. I apologize for that. I will try to answer all your questions. First, please take a look, if you haven't already, at this thread from a while back, as it should shed some light on "meditative states of oneness":
http://www.faithfreedom.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24518&highlight=
Before putting more words down, allow me to present some short videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wX_W1BB_0M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFFMtq5g8N4
Now onto the G-spot and brain correlates. The worldview of "scientific materialism" takes the UR-quadrant as the only real quadrant, and proceeds to attempt to explain the universe as if objects in the UR were its only constitutive elements. This curious homeopathic dilution of human consciousness and spirituality, leaving the universe composed of nothing but frisky dirt, might seem an extremely odd thing to do, and it most certainly is.
There are two mistakes we can make in regard to the Upper Right quadrant. One is to absolutize it, the other is to deny it. Modernity does the former, postmodernity the latter.
The point from an AQAL stance is that both Left Hand and Right Hand are equally important. While consciousness events are occurring in the Upper Left, they have correlates in the Upper Right. I see an apple and certain areas of my brain light up, as tracked by various devices such as an EEG machine. (These events have correlates in all 4 quadrants, but we are focusing on the individual.)
Every state of consciousness (including every meditative state) has a corresponding brain state, for example - they occur together, they are equally real dimensions of the same occasion, and cannot be reduced to the other.
The problem is that most conventional scientific approaches are locked into UR-quadrant absolutism and thus dismiss interior (UL) realities as being at best "epi-phenomena," or secondary productions of the real reality in the materialistic world (e.g., brain). This approach maintains that the brain produces thoughts the way the eye produces tears. But the brain does not produce thoughts. There is simply an occasion that, when looked at in one way, looks like thoughts (or mind), and when looked at in another perspective, looks like a brain. but thoughts cannot be reduced to brain (materialism), nor can brain be reduced to thoughts (idealism), nor is this an identity thesis.
The point at hand is simply that research into brain physiology and brain states in the UR is a very important item on an integral agenda, especially as regards contemplation and meditative states. Even better is to correlate those phenomena with phenomena in the other quadrants, which we call simul-tracking. Early simultracking research (at least in the individual quadrants) was first seriously done by Robert Keith Wallace and reported in Science journal in 1970, indicating that meditation involved a fourth, distinct state of consciousness with distinct physiological footprints. This UR research into UL consciousness initially had an electrifying effect: Meditation is real! Maybe even Spirit is real! You can measure it physiologically!
Richard Davidson and other researchers have continued this important line of research into the UR brain-states that are correlates of UL states of consciousness (including meditative states). Stages of consciousness have not yet received attention in this particular research, probably because this research is done in conjunction with Buddhism and limited approaches.
Unfortunately, one can only fear for how this research is being interpreted at this time by the scientific culture. Scientific materialism is eating this research alive. Spirit is nothing but the brain! God reduced to a brain state is now the most common result of this research, sadly. There is a God-spot - a new G-spot! - in an organism, this time in the brain. Tickle this G-spot and you get a supranatural orgasm as the brain shoots its load. But that's the scientific materialist claim: all that meditation does is activate certain areas in the material brain. Meditation doesn't give any sort of insight into something outside of the organism, it simply lights up a spot in the brain (or several of them), which causes, for example, a blurring or absence of self boundaries and a loss or diminishment of cognitive faculties, so that a subjective sense of "oneness" with the world results.
In short, scientific materialism does not take this research as evidence that Spirit is real, but just the opposite: as proof that spiritual realities are nothing but brain physiology, nothing but that darned ole G-spot activated. Divinity reduced to dopamine, and everybody can relax. And so would go quadrant absolutism yet again.
Quite apart from the abuses and reductionism involved with these Upper-Right approaches, an integral approach takes this quadrant and its phenomena very seriously. As related to consciousness studies, the general disciplines include neurophysiology, brain chemistry, genetic research, brainwave and brain-state research (EEG, fMRI, PET, etc.), and evolutionary biology.
Some brain signatures of corresponding mind or consciousness states (UL):
Mind State (Upper Left) -- Brain State (Upper Right)
(Or state of consciousness) -- (Or State of Physiology)
________________________________________
Deep Sleep -- Delta waves (1-4 Hz)
Dreaming -- Theta waves (4-7 Hz)
Hypnagogic -- Alpha waves (8-13 Hz)
Typical waking -- Beta waves (13-30 Hz)
Meditation -- Slow alpha/theta
Contemplation -- Slow alpha/theta plus beta and delta
| Quote: |
| do i need a university degree in meditation to understand this |
If only degrees in meditation and contemplation were offered in universities, and taught by masters! Look, the point is simple: when a master-level, or adequately trained and practiced meditator asserts that Spirit or God is real, and she basis that assertion on direct personal experience, it is not appropriate to dismiss that assertion when coming from an Upper Right worldview (for example, scientific materialism). If you want to know whether or not the experience is real, then you must take up the practice. Do this, to see this. |
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Militant Kafir
Joined: 08 Apr 2006
Posts: 1714
Location: land of blasphemy
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| Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 11:52 pm Post subject: |
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god is real because its asserted that way under a meditation state?! oh well, i guess i will never know because all this is too hard and esoteric.
i suspect some quackery in this, but a very good one. i will pass.
cheers!
_________________
an image is worth 1000 words:
http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/extreme_mohammed/
"billions of flies eat manure, billions of flies can’t be wrong." Ole Nydahl, budhist Lama thoughts on islam. |
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kosmo
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 111
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 1:39 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| god is real because its asserted that way under a meditation state?! |
More precisely, to judge the accuracy and truthfulness of an assertion of God's existence, you must know the level from which that assertion is being made.
At the risk of making an ass of myself, I will assume that, in your quest or collection of arguments against God or Spirit, that you have not taken the time to learn a meditative or contemplative practice. You probably have brilliant and rational answers to those that would assert Spirit's existence from a magical or mythological level, based on some sort of belief in an out there personality. However, you seem unprepared to answer the mystic's claim of Spirit, given that her basis for making such a claim is direct personal experience, facilitated by years of meditative or contemplative practice.
What I'm trying to show is that problems like the proof of God's existence are problems faced by metaphysics, but they are not problems faced by post-metaphysics. It's not that those problems are solved, but that they don't arise in the first place. Instead, any genuine post-metaphysics faces issues of Integral Methodological Pluralism and how best to proceed with that in order to create, among other things, various sorts of glossaries that replace problems of proof with problems of specifying Cosmic addresses and injunctions for enacting them.
Given what an All Quadrants All Levels post-metaphysics discloses, it becomes apparent how well-meaning but still meaningless virtually everything being written about spirituality is. Spiritual treatises are mostly an endless series of ontic assertions about spiritual realities - and assertions with no injunctions, no enactions, no altitude, no perspectives, no Cosmic addresses of either the perceiver or the perceived. They are, in every sense, meaningless metaphysics, not only plagued with extensively elaborate myths of the given, but riddled with staggering numbers of ontic and assertic claims devoid of justification.
I believe all of this is fairly easily remedied. Many of the spiritual realities referred to by these writers do in fact have all the requisites for converting them from meaningless metaphysics to meaningful post-metaphysics. They can be refitted in an AQAL matrix, specifying their Cosmic addresses and injunctions. This is precisely what Integral Institute, started by Ken Wilber, is doing: extensive "refitting jobs" for many of these writers and systems.
But until these types of updates occur, religion and spirituality will remain metaphysics dismissed by intelligent men and women, or reduced to their mythic-level manifestations, where they are embraced by, frankly, less intelligent men and women.
You might be surprised to know that many of us who are pushing a post-metaphysics were once staunch atheists. Of my friends and colleagues from two decades back who still are, I'm convinced that the primary reason is that they have yet to take up a meditative or contemplative practice; serious practice.
After age 15, you probably spent 6+ years of study and development to understand and rebut the worldview of mythic level deists. But that's not the end. A whole other group of believers, albeit much smaller, come from a causal or nondual level. To understand them will take you at least a couple more years. Of those who honestly and diligently put in the time, I know of none who have not radically transformed their views of God or Spirit.
While the meditative and contemplative paths are very esoteric (in the truest sense of the word), they are no more difficult than finding the place and taking the time. |
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Wiking
Joined: 03 Apr 2006
Posts: 2085
Location: Denmark
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:22 am Post subject: |
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So, what you are trying to say is that gods exist in the minds of people?
Doesn't that mean that the polytheists are right? There are billions of gods, one for every living person. Is this true for animals also?
Does my cat have a god?
Computers have developed to an extent where they start to make decisions based on experience, or in other words, what's on their mind. Will we in the future see computer gods evolve? Will there be desktop gods and laptop gods and mainframe gods?
Just curious.
_________________
Warning: Islam is detrimental to your brain!
Marriage in Islam |
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Fathom
Joined: 17 Mar 2006
Posts: 4062
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 3:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Wiking wrote: |
So, what you are trying to say is that gods exist in the minds of people?
Doesn't that mean that the polytheists are right? There are billions of gods, one for every living person. Is this true for animals also?
Does my cat have a god?
Computers have developed to an extent where they start to make decisions based on experience, or in other words, what's on their mind. Will we in the future see computer gods evolve? Will there be desktop gods and laptop gods and mainframe gods?
Just curious.
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Good point.
Right now the Quad 4 with 8 GIGS of RAM with three 10,000 RPM Raptors in a RAID Array is God. |
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kosmo
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 111
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 6:21 pm Post subject: |
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| Wiking wrote: |
| So, what you are trying to say is that gods exist in the minds of people? |
Not gods (lower case plural), but God, a distinct and singular experience. And yes, we experience God in our mind, the exact same way we experience mathematics in our mind. And in the same way that you are not allowed to vote on the veracity of the Pythagorean theorem without proper training, you are also not qualified to judge the veracity of the findings of the world's greatest mystics, sages, and gurus without the proper training.
I know, this is frustrating to hear for many of us: it is literally a paradigm shift. Your current position in regards to Spirit is supported by a purely mental structure. And along comes somebody with all kinds of advice on how to expand and modify that structure, when yours suits you just fine, thank you.
Look, I'm not trying to convince anybody here of the existence of Spirit. I am trying to convince you that in order to accurately and properly judge some other's claims of Spirit, in order to see what they claim to have seen, that you will need to follow part of the path they have tread.
Here's another claim: I have sustained periods (days and weeks, and sometimes months) of constant consciousness. This constant consciousness through all states - waking, dreaming, and sleeping - tends to occur after many years of meditating; in my case, about 15 years. The signs are very simple: you are conscious during the waking state, and then, as you fall asleep and start to dream, you still remain conscious of the dreaming. This is similar to lucid dreaming, but with a slight difference: usually, in lucid dreaming, you start to manipulate the dream - you choose to dream of sex orgies or great food or flying over mountains or whatnot. But with constant witnessing consciousness, there is no desire to change anything that arises: you simply and innocently witness it. It's a choiceless awareness, a mirrorlike awareness, which equally and impartially reflects whatever arises. So you remain conscious during the dream state, witnessing it, not changing it (although you can if you want; usually you don't want).
Then, as you pass into deep, dreamless sleep, you still remain conscious, but now you are aware of nothing but vast pure emptiness, with no content whatsoever. But "aware of" is not quite right, since there is no duality here. It's more like, there is simply pure consciousness itself, without qualities or contents or subjects or objects, a vast pure emptiness that is not "nothing" but is still unqualifiable.
Then, as you come out of the deep sleep state, you see the mind and the dream state arise and take form. That is, out of causal emptiness there arises the subtle mind (dreams, images, symbols, concepts, visions, forms), and you witness this emergence. The dream state continues for a while, and then, as you begin to wake up, you can see the entire gross realm, the physical realm - your body, the bed, the room, the physical universe, nature - arise directly out of the subtle mind state.
In other words, you have just taken a tour of the Great Chain of Being - gross subtle mind to causal spirit - in both its ascending and descending movements (evolution and involution). As you fall asleep, you pass from gross body (waking) to subtle mind (dreaming) to causal emptiness (deep sleep) - that's evolution or ascent - and then, as you awaken, you move down from causal to subtle to gross - that's involution or descent. (The actual order of states can vary, but the entire cycle is generally present.) Everybody moves through this cycle every twenty-four hours. But with constant consciousness or unbroken witnessing, you remain aware during all these changes of state, even into dreamless sleep.
Since the ego exists mostly in the gross state, with a few remnants in the subtle, then once you identify with constant consciousness - or that which exists in all three states - you break the hold of the ego, since it barely exists in the subtle and does not exist at all in causal emptiness (or in the deep sleep state, which is one type of emptiness). You cease identifying with ego, and you identify with pure formless consciousness as such, which is oderless, spaceless, timeless, formless - pure clear emptiness, You identify with nothing in particular, and therefore you can embrace absolutely everything that arises. Gone to the ego, you are one with the All.
You still have complete access to the waking-state ego, but you are no longer only that. Rather, the very deepest part of you is one with the entire Kosmos in all its radiant glory. You simply are everything that is arising moment to moment. You do not see the sky, you are the sky. You do not touch the earth, you are the earth. You do not hear the rain, you are the rain. You and the universe are what the mystics call "One Taste".
This is not poetry. This is a direct realization, as direct as a glass of cold water in the face. As a great Zen Master said upon his enlightenment: "When I heard the sound of the bell ringing, there was no bell and no I, just the ringing." And in that nondual ringing is the entire Kosmos, where subject and object become One Taste and infinity happily surrenders its secrets. As researchers from Aldus Huxley to Huston Smith have reminded us, One Taste or "cosmic consciousness" - the sense of oneness with the Ground of all creation - is the deepest core of the nearly universal consensus of the world's great wisdom traditions. One Taste is not a hallucination, fantasy, or product of a disturbed psyche, but the direct realization and testament of countless yogis, saints, and sages the world over.
It is very simple, very obvious, very clear - concrete, palpable, unmistakable. |
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Wiking
Joined: 03 Apr 2006
Posts: 2085
Location: Denmark
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:56 pm Post subject: |
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I have to admit, I don't understand!
So the God (not gods) has abandoned heaven and taken abode inside the heads of billions of people, just like mathematics and the Pythagorean theorem?
I am lost!
Are you sure you are all right?
_________________
Warning: Islam is detrimental to your brain!
Marriage in Islam |
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kosmo
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 111
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| Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2007 7:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| So the God (not gods) has abandoned heaven and taken abode inside the heads of billions of people |
Is it a timeline you're after? Well, Plotinus had held the Ascending and Descending currents together admirably, expressing and polishing the original Platonic nonduality. And the nondual school of Plato/Plotinus would have almost certainly carried the day - as the essentially similar systems of Shankara and Nagarjuna would do for Hinduism and Buddhism, respectively - were it not for the one overwhelming and utterly decisive factor: the entrance on the scene of mythic-literal Christianity.
With its mythic-dissociated God ontologically divorced from nature and human nature - what Tillich called "the strict dualism of a divine sphere in heaven and a human sphere on earth" - there was no way to finally ground God in this world. And thus no way that a human being's final destiny could be realized in this life, in this body, on this earth. The other-worldy Ascenders, fractured through and through - and driven in part, as all exclusive Ascenders are, by Phobos (fear of earth, body, nature, woman, sex, and sense) - could and would dominate (although never exclusively rule) the Western scene for a millennium.
But the ironic point is that this mythically ascended God wasn't even a truly ascended or transcended God - it wasn't even a Gnostic or causal-level One (except for a very few realizers). It was, through and through, a mythic-level production: a geocentric, egocentric, anthropocentric local volcano god - Yahweh by name - whose true structural colors were shown precisely in the fact that He touched human history only by interfering with it, either to "reward" or "punish" His "chosen" peoples or, more often, to miraculously smite the enemies of His chosen people, or otherwise spend His time turning spinach into potatoes.
There is simply no mistaking the structures of consciousness that authors such productions, and it has led to some very harsh judgments from the more profound thinkers of the Christian (and Judaic) tradition itself, starting with Clement and Origen (and Philo), all of whom would concur with Paul Tillich: "Things like miraculous interventions of God, special inspirations and revelations are beneath the level of real religious experience. Religion itself is immediacy (by which he means precisely the immediacy of Wakefulness or pure Presence, which is Spirit in us, as Tillich himself makes very clear). The supernaturalistic heritage about the suspension of the laws of nature for the sake of miracles collapses completely."
But it was not the simple existence of the Roman Christian mythic empire that was problematic. That mythic-rational structure acted as the basic principle of cultural meaning and social integration for virtually a thousand years; it was phase-specifically appropriate enough, bringing with it all the advances (and all the disasters): New forms of sociocentric morality and the beginning belief (post-conventional) in the equal status of all citizens under the (Roman) law and in the eyes of God - replete, of course, with all the empire-building and imperialism and military "globalizing" attempts inherent in the mythic-rational structure.
When we discuss the systems of Plato or Plotinus (or Nagarjuna or Shankara), we are speaking of the most advanced or leading edge of consciousness development for that period; I have no expectation that that would or could have become the average-mode consciousness at that point in time, nor do I judge the average-mode consciousness of that time with the standards of today's average mode. It was not the arrival of the Roman Christian mythic-military empire that was the particular problem; it was what the worldview of the average-mode development did to the leading-edge worldview: it pronounced it anathema, condemned it, and condemned it thoroughly, rigorously, even viciously at times (particularly in the Counter-Reformation), and in ways that (with very few exceptions) happened nowhere else in world history on quite that scale.
Every structure of consciousness is suspicious of all higher structures, structures lying whithin and beyond it, structures that are in fact its own inherent potential, but structures that require a frightening death and rebirth to unfold in each case. And societies, it seems, can be arranged along a continuum of tolerance for those structures that exist higher than the structure of its own principles of social integration and cohesion. The very success, and the constant threats, to the mythic-military Christian empire put tolerance - never a strong point in mythic structures - virtually out of the question. Any outspoken person who evidenced a structure of consciousness higher than the mythic-rational was, correctly enough, viewed as a political threat and condemned, in effect, for treason.
The condemnation was often pandemic: the structures of Reason (and science) were condemned because they demanded evidence (reason was therefore allowed only in the service of Dogma). The psychic level of nature-nation mysticism was condemned because it brought God "too much into" this world, it "dragged God down" from His celestial throne in the Heavenly City above. Subtle-level mysticism was condemned, or at best barely tolerated, because it brought the soul up too close to God. And the Church became absolutely apoplectic if anybody expressed a causal-level intuition of supreme identity with Godhead - the Inquisition would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake and condemn the thesis of Meister Eckhart on such grounds.
But that was an old story for causal-level Realizers at the hands of mythic believers, starting with Jesus of Nazareth, whose own causal-level realization ("I and the Father are One") would not be treated kindly. "Why do you stone me?" Jesus asks. "Is it for good works?" The pious reply: "No, it is not for good works; it is because you, being a man, make yourself out God." His reply that "we are all sons (and daughters) of God" was lost on the crowd, and that realization led him, as it would al-Hallaj and Bruno and Origen and a long line of subsequent Realizers, to a grisly death for both political and religious reasons - it was simultaneously a threat to the state and to the old religion.
Church dogma handled the case of the extraordinary Realizer from Nazareth in a very ingenious way, using all the powers of rationality to prop up the myth. It was true, they granted, that Jesus was one with God (or, as they would later put it, God is one substance with three Persons - Tertullian's trinitas - and the person of Jesus has two natures: Divine and Human). But let the causal-level ascension stop there. No other person shall be allowed this Realization, even though, as everybody plainly knew at the time, Jesus never made a single remark suggesting that he alone had or could have this Realization, and he explicitly forbade his followers to use the term "Messiah" in reference to him.
But, as many commentators have pointed out, if the Nazarene had in fact realized a Godhead that belongs to all, equally and fully, then there was no way he could be made the sole property of an exclusive mythology. Put bluntly, there was no way to market him. So Jesus was made, not the suffering servant of all humankind, which was all he ever claimed, but the Sole Son of Jehovah, literally. In other words, he was tucked downward and seamlessly into the prevailing mythology, and seen as yet another (but much greater) instance of a miraculous and supernatural intervention in history to save a new group of chosen peoples: those who embraced the Church, the one true way and only salvation for all souls (which meant: the only way for imperial-political cohesion of the mythic empire).
The realization of the Nazarene was thus placed on a pedestal and made an utterly unique property of the Church (and not directly a property of the Soul). It should be remembered that at this stage in development, the moral and political spheres (church and state) had not yet been differentiated (which is true for all mythological structures - the head of state gains legitimacy by claiming mythogenic status, by claiming to be specially connected to, descended from, or one with the gods/goddesses: Cleopatra is Isis). As Tillich explains, "This meant that the person who breaks the canonic law of doctrines is not only a heretic, one who disagrees with the fundamental doctrines of the church, but he is also a criminal against the state. Since the heretic undermines not only the church but also the state, he must be not only excommunicated but also delivered into the hands of the civil authorities to be punished as a criminal."
The Church would produce many great philosophers (reason), and many great psychic and causal mystics, but no matter how much these realizers tried to downplay the myths, no matter how much they allegorized them or as-iffed them or interpreted them away, there was always the one fundamental dogma that hung like a weight around their attempts to transcend, that crashed down on their shoulders and pinned them to the ground and never but never budged an inch: the utterly unique and nonreproducible realization of Jesus.
The Ascension itself was immediately mythologized, following the very old mythic motif of the three-day-dead-and-resurrected lunar consort of the Earth goddess (in pagan rituals, as well as in the Christianized version, one would "eat the flesh" and "drink the blood" of the consort, thus to participate in its resurrected powers). Individual Christians who shared the proper mythic belief (or faith) would therefore also be resurrected, after death, on Judgment Day, in another world, where their bodies would be reassembled ("Um, excuse me, isn't that my fourth metacarpal you've got there?") to sit forever with Jehovah, His Son, and Company. There was no way for individuals to find enlightenment or ascension in this life, on this earth. Any and all who claimed otherwise were thus immediately both heretics and criminals.
Again, I have no quarrel with these phase-specific mythic-rational structures and the interpretation that it (necessarily) gave to the Realization of the Adept from Nazareth. It was a crucial component of social integration and cultural meaning at that point in development, and it apparently served its purpose quite well. The problem, rather, was the degree to which and the fury with which this Realization was so thoroughly reduced to mythic levels. Rarely has causal-level realization been translated so dramatically downward. Rarely has such a powerful realization been allowed to produce so few same-level realizers in its followers.
Not Buddha, not Shankara, not Lao Tzu; not Valentinus, not Numenius, not Apollonius; not Dogen, not Fa-tsang, not Chih-i; not Garab Dorje, not Tsongkapa, not Padmasambhava - none would be so thoroughly reduced. It is simply astonishing. Myths would, of course, grow up around all of those realizers, precisely for those individuals who relate to reality in that degree; but their final teaching, causal/nondual, was available to all who embraced the practice, engaged the injunctions, went beyond myth and reason and psychic and subtle, and discovered the Empty Ground in their own case. And to any student who awakened to discover that he or she was actually One with the infinite Ground, in formless identity, the reply came back, in all cases: "Congratulations! You finally discovered who you are!"
The reply that came back from the Church was: you shall now be toast.
There's some people claiming things about themselves, God, and the Universe. They claim to have used a machine (themselves) to see God, to have an experience with the Universe. There are many ways for us to examine, categorize, and judge the validity of those claims: I propose that if we do not include, in our bag of tools, the attempt to reproduce their experiences by following the experiment as they layed it out, then our knowledge quest is not complete, is not integral, and from the get go dimisses one-half of the potential data.
| Quote: |
| Are you sure you are all right? |
More relevant; are you sure, and how? |
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gupsfu
Joined: 06 Jul 2004
Posts: 7919
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Lotus Feet
Joined: 24 Sep 2006
Posts: 5014
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| Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:55 pm Post subject: |
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Those that have experienced God know its a sure thing and certainly not in the mind. However, its OK man has to go through the mind process before he can understand the heart. The door to God experiences are through the purity of the heart, the purity of the third eye and purity of the soul. It is only the purified and sanctified that can look the perfection of God in the face.
Why?
The light is so bright it would burn you to a cinder.
Lotus Feet
_________________
Sons of God commit no violence in thought, word or deed. For they are the light of divine love. |
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Big Rob
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Posts: 653
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| Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 9:59 pm Post subject: Re: Is God Real? |
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| kosmo wrote: |
Is God Real?
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Is there an elephant sitting in lap? |
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Wiking
Joined: 03 Apr 2006
Posts: 2085
Location: Denmark
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| Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 7:08 am Post subject: |
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| kosmo wrote: |
| Well, Plotinus had held the Ascending and Descending currents together admirably, expressing and polishing the original Platonic nonduality. |
| kosmo wrote: |
| ....It was, through and through, a mythic-level production: a geocentric, egocentric, anthropocentric local volcano god - Yahweh by name - whose true structural colors were shown precisely in the fact that He touched human history only by interfering with it, either to "reward" or "punish" His "chosen" peoples or, more often, to miraculously smite the enemies of His chosen people, or otherwise spend His time turning spinach into potatoes. |
| kosmo wrote: |
| "Things like miraculous interventions of God, special inspirations and revelations are beneath the level of real religious experience. Religion itself is immediacy (by which he means precisely the immediacy of Wakefulness or pure Presence, which is Spirit in us, as Tillich himself makes very clear). The supernaturalistic heritage about the suspension of the laws of nature for the sake of miracles collapses completely." |
I am completely lost!
| kosmo wrote: |
| The reply that came back from the Church was: you shall now be toast. |
Sounds more like Mohammedanism to me. Roast in Hell!
I cannot make anything out of this long article. Are you sure you are well?
_________________
Warning: Islam is detrimental to your brain!
Marriage in Islam |
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