Whateverist
Active Member
Another ontological primitive though it is linked to energy. Between matter and consciousness I think the latter is most basic but for no reason I can give.
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An official re-introduction thread for a returnee from the SF Bay Area
- Thread starter Whateverist
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Another ontological primitive though it is linked to energy. Between matter and consciousness I think the latter is most basic but for no reason I can give.
Aupmanyav
Be your own guru
Why? Cite e=mc^2.
My God, our histories and views are almost parallel, in a cosmic stream sort of way. I was a moderator for over 10 years at ex-christian .net (Antlerman was my username) and my story is nearly the same as for you. Atheist members would dogpile any religious person who ventured in, and drove out any possible hope of any meaningful discussions with their "where's your evidence" line, or ridiculing "woo woo", whenever the topic went above their heads, venturing into moderate views on anything religion related.
I too eventually dropped the atheist term as a result of that, along with finding the it really didn't fit how I saw the nature of reality to actually be in the deeper more spiritual aspects of our humanity. I became disillusioned by this whole substitute religion of rationality, as just another form of fundamentalism with a new hat. I respected rationality too much for what I was experiencing like that, and it no longer was helpful for me as it was at first in my early "debunking" or deconstructive period of healing from fundamentalist religion. That too had to go.
I love how you term it when speaking with Christians as a "fluency in code-switching". I know very well what you mean and do that myself. I term is as I can speak as a Christian or I can speak as an Atheist. The terms and language is not an issue for me, as I see underlying all of that as simply ways to translate one's own experience of Reality, through that system of symbols and mental frameworks.
"To the Greek I am a Greek. To the Jew I am a Jew", I think is how Paul put it, though that might be slightly different that how I mean it. I can speak about that Mystery, using the language of mythic-religion, or I can speak of it using modern scientific language, or any number of other ways. Even the atheist is using faith, even though they hate the term. It is still a view towards Ultimate Truth and meaning.
I think in terms of Integral philosophy, they might call that being a "spiral wizard", which means you can relate to, inhabit, see the world though, and speak to and from all the spectrums of the stages you have inhabited. I can speak as a Christian. I can speak as an Atheist. I can speak as a theist. I can speak as a nondualist. etc. All of these are ultimately views on Ultimate Reality.
Also, yes, if I speak as a theist, it is always much more as a panentheist. God with qualities, or Saguna Brahman. That I see as panentheistic. I also embrace as equally true, Nirguna Brahman, or God without qualities - the Formless, Emptiness, the Void, etc.
Glad you're here. Finally, I don't feel quite as alone anymore.
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Whateverist
Active Member
Right back at you. Of course though some degree of alone is existentially inevitable and not so objectionable so long as we have a few confidantes.
Also, just notice this in your signature:
I've picked up dribs and drabs of L.W. but hadn't read this one. (In college Tractates was the only book required and I had trouble enough keeping up with the reading load.) It is so true and helps to explain how fundamentalist atheists can fail to notice how the excluded middle, an expectation that everything can be explained in terms of more elementary parts and an unreserved confidence rationality and science 'because look at all it's done for us'. Right, like promote a life of cynical nihilism, doubt in ones own existence as a self and stiff upper lip acceptance of determinism. The simple test of what one's faith is in is: what do you do, how do you act when you're under the gun with a lot riding on it and little time to decide? [Pro tip: brain storming and research won't cut it if the decision is upon you and consequences lie on all sides.]
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PoetPhilosopher
Veteran Member
Hi. Always good to have more philosophers.
Whateverist
Active Member
In truth I can't really speak as a Christian can. Certainly I cannot proof text and at 70 I have no desire to pick up that learning. But generally when speaking with a Christian, it's like taking in poetry and then speaking in what I take to be the spirit and intent of the poem. There was a Christian mystic at BL for a while who told me I was one too. I think that is the only way I can approach it, I lack either the straight jacket or the option for any other path.
I do believe that the primordial nature/cosmos which differentiates into the many forms is a mystery and that it connect in real ways to the world studied by physics as well as intuited directly just by noticing what comes when one is quiet. Christianity would be better off in my book not to claim exclusive possession of the truth by way of its testimony to the one historical incursion of the 'supernatural' into the natural world. It is fine to believe it if that is what is given one to intuit, but how lacking in humility or regard for neighbors. No scientific/historical access to the One is coming. Whatever mythos supports your connection is the right one for you, I think. But I am happy to have no extravagant reliance on anything completely incommeasuable with the natural world. I think religious people would be better served building up their understanding of the natural rather than relocating to the super-.
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Whateverist
Active Member
Absolutely. Better a forward looking, always open search for truth than flank protecting defense of whole cloth, standard issue truth vouchsafed by thousands.
I have the advantage in that I had learned and adopted that language in order to try to further understand the nature of a mystical experience I had prior to any religious exposure. So as I plunged myself into to learn as much as I could, I picked out what resonated with me, which spoke to the truth of that experience, but ended up jettisoning all the rest, which basically meant leaving institutional religion. What Ghandi said captures that for me, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
So now, I say that when it comes to Wisdom sayings, I say that Christianity is my native tongue. Yet, I understand its teachings from a much more mystically-informed perspective. It was just something that happened as I was meditating and suddenly old verses and passage of scripture came to mind that fit with the experience.
It's hard to explain this, but it's like seeing them in a new light, words I'd heard countless times before, but recognizing them outside of the context of religious egotism, which they being filtered though as they came from the pulpit. I describe it as a watershed point, where a drop of rain hits it and travels either to the East coast or the West coast. It's a fine line between the ego and the divine, and it depend which "self" is translating the words.
Well put. I try to hear what is behind what they are saying and where it is coming from. Is it sincere, or is it the ego trying to build itself up using religion to justify itself? All too often it's nothing more that that. Everything I see in this right-wing evangelical nationalism, is zero spirituality and all ego.
I just watched Shiny Happy People about the Duggars, and the whole Christian right homeschool program and the "Joshua generation", and it is pure evil. There is zero spiritual truth in any of that. And if there are those who manage to find it while part of it, then they do so despite it.
The turning point for me in no longer calling myself an atheist is when a friend called me out on using the term. She said to me, "You're really not an atheist. You're a mystic". And she was right. I had been saying I was a "spiritual atheist", but why? My views are able to embrace both atheism and theism, by seeing beyond them both. They are kind of a moot point.
But I resist calling myself a Christian mystic as well. I really do not formally follow it in ritual practices and such. I draw from multiple sources to inform me, from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism and other mystic traditions. They all point to the same thing.
As I said though, Christianity is my native tongue, so it's with that language I can most easily navigate it's symbols and teachings to convey the deeper, actual realization of mystical states. I like to muse saying, "I am the same religion as God is". When you figure that out, then that's my answer.
Agreed
Ya think?
Yes, that's just the ego trying to be #1! God's special chosen ones better than the rest. "I'm so blessed I'm not like these others, born in a foreign land believing in other religions. I will go save them and God will give me even more riches in my heavenly home! Me! Me! Me!"I agree again. I like to say whatever works is good. There is a truth I found in a passage from the Bhagavad Gita 9:26 where Krishna says so beautifully,
"If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit a water, I will. accept it."
It has nothing to do with right ideas or beliefs. It all has to do with the sincerity and love of the heart, where Truth accepts us and fills us. Anything that says otherwise, is the ego speaking.
Here's a great quote you can find that sentiment expressed in by Sri Aurobindo. Have a sure footing in understand the natural world, allows us to reach the highest Knowledge. It's about being grounded in sensible facts, yet not lost in assuming that by reducing it to atoms will find ultimate Truth.
"It is necessary, therefore, that advancing Knowledge should base herself on a clear, pure and disciplined intellect. It is necessary, too, that she should correct her errors sometimes by a return to the restraint of sensible fact, the concrete realities of the physical world. The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness – to its heights we can always search– when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. “Earth is His footing,” says the Upanishad whenever it imagines the Self that manifests in the universe. And it is certainly the fact the wider we extend and the surer we make our knowledge of the physical world, the wider and surer becomes our foundation for the higher knowledge, even for the highest, even for the Brahmavidya.
In emerging, therefore, out of the materialistic period of human Knowledge we must be careful that we do not rashly condemn what we are leaving or throw away even one tittle of its gains, before we can summon perceptions and powers that are well grasped and secure, to occupy their place. Rather we shall observe with respect and wonder the work that Atheism had done for the Divine and admire the services that Agnosticism has rendered in preparing the illimitable increase of knowledge. In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal. Well, if it could always be, as it has been in the great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious, clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless and presumptuous aberration."
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pg 12,13
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Whateverist
Active Member
Hi again Secret, Chiefly one.
My friend @vulcanlogician is thinking of getting the Kindle version and like you wants to access through a device he already has. Do you happen to know if that is compatible with PC? You're reading it on an iPad but I suppose someone would read it on a phone too. Not so sure about using a computer though.
@vulcanlogician what would you do you hope to run it on? I guess there are apps for pads like there are for phones, is that right @Secret Chief ?
Secret Chief
nirvana is samsara
Prof Google says there's a kindle app for PC, iOS and Android.
(I'm still reading two other books at the mo. Godnose why two).
Whateverist
Active Member
Enjoy it while you can. If this book sets its hook into you that may change. Personally just as soon as I finish I intend to get back to good novels which have taught me so much. Philosophy and nonfiction is going to get a rest.
Whateverist
Active Member
Enjoy it while you can. If this book sets its hook into you that may change. Personally just as soon as I finish it I intend to get back to reading good novels which have taught me so much. Philosophy and nonfiction is going to get a rest.
PureX
Veteran Member
I agree. All "belief" is, is our choosing to presume that we are right about "X" when we have no way of actually knowing that we are. If we knew it we would say that we know it, and why. But we don't so instead we choose to "believe it", anyway. It's basically a conceit. And an unnecessary one as there is no requirement that we believe "X" is true before we can act on that possibility.
I try to explain to people all the time that there is a subtle but important difference between belief and faith. Belief being an unfounded presumption of knowing something that we don't actually know. Whereas faith is our choosing to 'act as if' in the full awareness of our unknowing. And the reason this difference is so important is that the believer has to reject doubt, to believe. Whereas the faithful can fully accept their doubt, and the possibility of their being wrong, and still choose to act on the hope that they are right.
Most of the atheists here fight to reject this difference, of course, because they want to lump belief and faith together under the umbrella of foolish fantasies and unfounded superstitions so they can dismiss the whole mess as 'theism', en masse, and with prejudice. Which they've done even before being introduced to this idea.
Well, ultimately "God" refers to the great mystery source, sustenance, and purpose of all that is. It's not something we can articulate in any detail given our very limited means of grasping it, and apart from that all encompassing definition it pretty much becomes personal, anyway.
Religions are just collections of cognitive tools like stories and images, rituals, practices, rules, doctrines and so on that people can use as they choose to help them live their lives according to whatever theological position they have chose as their own. Debating those tools is of not much use to anyone except perhaps the people using them.
WELCOME TO THIS DISCUSSION!
Whateverist
Active Member
I think of faith as being more like a disposition than anything one can capture in a proposition. Yet some people will insist faith is entirely reducible to propositions, demonstrating something about what their faith is in: language, definitions, logic and -of course - science. Many have faith that science will eventually answer all questions and, when it does the answers will be explicitly expressive in language. I quoted something on faith as disposition on an earlier thread. I’ll do so again here as I think it is worth it:
[My earlier intro to the quote:] Science is the gold standard for determining what is factually true empirically. But what you count on in human affairs is rarely amenable to being determined with science. "Belief that" is about knowledge while "belief in" is about faith- which need not be about theism, though it can be and traditionally has been. So when you say what you count on in life as a human being, it isn't about science even though science can often contribute in some minor way even in life choices. But one doesn't "believe in science" and life demands that we cope with many social choices and matters of conscience whether we are religious or not (and I'm not). I think Iain McGilchrist expressed this much more thoroughly than I could in his first big book, The Master and His Emissary:
Whateverist
Active Member
Agreed. Not sure if you are characterizing rabid religious belief, the kind of boundless certainty many Christians especially in the USA whip themselves into believing they possess. If only they could distinguish between belief in something important for which factual evidence is not and likely always will not be unavailable and the strict philosophical sort of "knowledge". Almost nothing in human affairs outside of technology is known to such a standard, and hardline atheists who claim otherwise (even as a negation) come off as just as silly as true believers on the opposite side of the belief divide.
But sometimes we act on beliefs for which we have skimpy support and still judge it to be the best course of action. "Knowledge" is confusing in English because we make no conceptual distinction between the kind of knowing we have of people and places. If we live in one place a long time we may come to know it better and better but what we know is never reducible to a finite set of explicit propositions which is all there is to know, and the same goes for persons. Certainty is only possible in empirical matters and not always there either. But without the connaitre/savoir distinction of French or kennel vs wissen in German. We don't have a ready cognitive distinction in which to ground an assumption of varying degrees of certainty in different contexts. That leads to confusion.
Yes many atheists are as eager for certainty and just as careless about pursuing it as any fundamentalist believer.
That works for me. I code switch "God" for something like this - the ground of being, the one from which the many are differentiated. But I can't make "God/gods" as beings apart from everything else that are anything like a person work for me. None the less I believe in something greater which grounds all the important aspects of our humanity. We don't, cannot and never will live entirely deliberately and fully conscious of every minute detail of our experience. If reflection has any value for insight and inspiration, we must believe there is something more in our depths which grounds those things even if we are more comfortable thinking of it as our "muse" than our "god".
Very reassuring to hear there is such discussion. My early attempts were shot out of the water, no doubt to maintain the tranquility of the status quo. Glad you are here too.