AmericanFirst
Gold Member
- Dec 17, 2009
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Einstien thought he was smarter than God also. I guarrantee he wasn't, and by now realizes that fact. So you are a post graduate student, congrats. You are still wrong.I'd like to quote our conversation like you are. It makes our responses to specific questions easier to identify, but for some reason, I can't use anything on the board. I don't know why, but it makes my posts a little harder to follow, so bear with me Dragon.
Here's how you do that. After using the "quote" button, you'll see some code at the beginning and end. The word "quote" appears between brackets [] at the beginning and "/quote" at the end, also in brackets. The first quote begins the quote formatting, and the second one ends it. To put something in quote formatting, simply type similar code at the beginning and end of the section you wish to set off.
Actually the code at the beginning says "quote=" followed by the name of the poster being quoted and some stuff at the end; this results in the text "Originally posted by The Irish Ram" at the beginning.
I understand your premise, I don't understand it's purpose.
If you are not two, but one, and the illusion of you is God wearing a mask, my first question is,
Why does God need a mask?
An excellent question, and one without a completely satisfactory answer. Probably the best two I've seen are the two I used at the beginning of my novel The Golden Game, this one from William Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell":
The other is from Liber Al Vel Legis by Aleister Crowley:
Unity means stasis, because there is no distinction between one moment and the next -- and since everything that happens must happen in time, division therefore is necessary for anything to happen. Of course, that only takes the question back a step, because one must then ask why anything needs to happen. Perhaps Crowley's answer is the correct one, and it's all for the sake of love, which requires two at minimum.
In fact, this sort of speculation is one reason why I reject the idea, which one can find in eastern religions or some interpretations thereof, that incarnation and material existence is a mistake to be rectified. Since all is/was One ab initio, if the goal were to get back there, why are we here? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
A parallel error IMO is the comparable idea in Western religions that the point of life is an afterlife. Although in specific these two are different ideas, they have a similar implication that our "real" lives are somewhere other than this world. I wrote a blog entry on that called "The First Noble Falsehood," which you can read here if you're interested: The Dragon Talking: The First Noble Falsehood
Be that as it may, and as I said earlier, I don't have a complete and uplifting story to offer here. All I know for certain is that there is the All, which is the true I, and there is the division of the I into fragments (not only in space but also in time), and my own ego or limited self-sense is an organizing method for one such fragmentary division. Perhaps the All isn't God in the sense you mean; perhaps God is something that is evolving still, a potential to be realized way down the road, and in prayer what we sense is a sort of "virtual God."
No, that doesn't follow, because morality is not something that's founded in the All to begin with, but is a function operant at a lower, more particular level. Consider that you have to have division and hence the possibility of action before you can prefer one action over another. So while one can argue that it's all the same to God (with perfect justification IMO), that doesn't mean it is, or should be, all the same to US -- by which I mean the ordinary idea of "us."
Part of chopping wood and carrying water is making moral judgments. That's something we do because it's how we're put together. And I am familiar with the argument that since we're all God anyway compassion is pointless, but if the division is for love, for the chance of union, that's hardly true -- and anyway, lack of compassion is equally pointless from that cosmic view, so hardly to be preferred. And we have lower-down reasons to prefer compassion.
There are ideas ABOUT the senses which are, but the senses THEMSELVES are not. You don't have to reason logically to know that you are hearing something, or that any experience is happening. This is something you literally cannot doubt while it's happening. The same is true of mystical experience: it can't be doubted while it's happening -- literally. I don't mean doubting it doesn't make logical sense, I mean it's literally, utterly impossible to doubt it.
I would have a very hard time explaining that, though.
Hmm, not just that. But the spiritual experience really is, operationally speaking, what God is -- the reality underlying the ideas. Or rather, whatever reality gives rise to spiritual experience is that.
Oh yes, all of those are time-honored methods of altering consciousness, as is meditation, prayer, religious ritual, and it can also happen spontaneously. Sometimes I get into the state while writing poetry. I've seen it done through dance, through sex, through all kinds of things. However, it's also possible to enter a drugged state and come nowhere near a mystical experience, so it's not as simple as it sounds.
No, it's a set of ideas about who you are. Awareness remains. Let me tell you about one exercise that helped me and has helped students of mine from time to time. I call it "going in/going out."
Start with a breathing exercise for a few minutes. Then discard in your mind your identification with various parts of your environment -- your possessions, your body, your mind, your feelings. As you do this, if you do it right, your body-awareness will dim and your mind will quiet. You will eventually be left identified with nothing, with an infinitely small part at the center.
Then take up these parts of "yourself" again, and now expand outward. Let the dividing line between you and your immediate surroundings be expanded so that they are included in your perception of "self." Keep expanding that line so that it encompasses the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos (at each stage, if need be, you can recognize the physical interaction which identifies all of these as a single system.)
The end-point experience of both going in and going out is similar. But at all stages of it, you remain aware, you just change your understanding of selfhood, and so come to see, on a visceral and experiential level, that the normal concept of selfhood is a convenience, and arbitrary function of memory, and in a very specific sense an illusion.
What Jesus started was a Jewish sect, which the Apostles and their followers continued after the Crucifixion. What Paul of Tarsus started was a diverse non-Jewish religion that followed Jesus' teachings and certain ideas about Jesus that Paul promulgated (although branches of it spun wide of those ideas). What the Emperor Constantine, via the bishops of his time, started was a political body that employed Christian doctrine to uphold the authority of the Empire. And it is from this Imperial Church that modern Christian doctrine in its standard form, as shared by the Orthodox, Catholic, and most Protestant Christians, derives. The idea that Christian theology and doctrine derives directly from the teachings of Christ is one for which there is no evidence, and there is much evidence from the Gospels and from the forms of worship followed by the earliest post-Crucifixion Nazarenes that he never intended to found a new religion at all.
As I said, all of that derives from accounts of other people who have undergone mystical experience. That includes Jesus, of course.
Everything in religion that is not mysticism is make-believe.
If that were true, there would be no difference between a prophet and a psychic. A prophet is not a fortune-teller; he is someone who claims to speak for God, and he can make that claim only on the basis of personal experience, and the only such experience that ever happens to anyone is mystical in nature. If he does predict the future (some prophets do, some don't), that is a power derived from his or her experience of God, and it is the experience of God that remains primary and defining.
Through his prophets, I have a tangible map of the events I am watching on TV. My God lets me know what to expect on this earth.
An interesting claim. Care to make some of those predictions public so we can test the theory?
Gentle Dragon,
Satan can make you feel like a million bucks.
I know you mean well, but you are giving kindergarten lessons to a postgraduate student. There really is not much point in doing that.