GENIUS FORUMS

Alex Jacob wrote:A work of Nietzsche that you might enjoy, Jason, though it is quite a piece of dynamite, is On the Genealogy of Morals. It is 3 medium-sized essays that can be read fairly quickly. The Oxford edition is my favorite.

I might give it a read. I was already aware of most of what you wrote about Nietzsche here. Even though I haven't read much of Nietzsche's writings themselves I have read some overviews of his main ideas. My driving desire and goal with philosophy has always been to find absolute truth, and once I became aware of particular ideas and problems e.g. solipsism, the worth of the vast majority of influential philosophy and philosophers plummeted for me. In terms of reaching my goal they became largely irrelevant and useless and a waste of my time and energy.

Nietzsche noticed that in antiquity strong and valiant men just acted in their world. They came, they saw, they took. To be 'good' was to be powerful, rich, capable, self-empowered. Very much the values of warriors. Someone came along at some point---those pesky Jews according to Nietzsche---and attacked the previous value-system by calling it 'bad' and especially 'evil'. They put a different spin on 'good' and equated it will all those who suffered as the powerful man when a-ransacking. That whole value system is tied to a peculiar stance: ressentiment (resentment), and is the weak man's way of controlling and shaming the powerful man. The ultimate psychological punishment for this powerful, in the eyes of the powerless, is to hope-foresee that the powerful man will land in hell. A whole metaphysic arose to support the desire for revenge of the little man, which is Christian theology and 'ethics'. One of Nietzsche's ideas is that this powerful man, likely a noble, had a brother with too much time on his aristocratic hands, and so he spent his time forging a whole inner space for his culpability to flourish, his culpability-ressentiment against his powerful 'brother'. That person is the Priest.

Nietzsche noticed that if everyone really embodied the Christian ethics, all the achievements of old would no longer be possible. After all, the great gains of yore were achieved with no thought of the cost to the little people. For example establishing empires, ruling families, conquering new worlds, using stolen wealth to build cities and states, to get and achieve all that we now are (in respect to people who do not have, for example the Third World). The Christian ethic attacks all these attainments, and renders modern man a 'mediocre' man. A scared little rabbit, a fearful kneeling coward, who can take no giant strides in the world.

Since I don't know Nietzsche's ideas that deeply I can't respond directly to them in a very detailed way, but I may have explored some similar territory and arrived at similar conclusions to Nietzsche without knowing that he has tread the same paths.

I do agree that there is a serious problem whereby a particular sort of weakness and mediocrity is promoted and made into an ideal. Right now you can see this type of thing in common sentiments like "as long as it doesn't hurt anyone" , "who am I to decide what is right" , "everyone is equal" , "I'm not certain of anything" and "no one will ever find an ultimate answer." This sort of attitude, and it is currently widely spread in both secular and theistic segments of Western society, is a large impediment to growth and greatness.

It is a path of least resistance, a desire for comfort above all things, avoiding conflict at all costs. Any attempt at greatness is spoiled before it is even given a chance to begin. In this way the possibility of failure and everything that goes with failure on such a grand scale, is nipped in the bud.

It is the mindset of small people, those who have relinquished their spirit, who have been beaten into submission by life. It's a deep state of resignation which often has a strong denial element to it too. They make an ideal out of surrender and giving up and being content with little things. As far as I can tell a lot of it is sour grapes all the way down.

Having said all that however, I also disagree with the view that all power, all domination, all the time, is beneficial to growth and greatness. As I related to you in a recent post, in which I compared my philosophical journey to combat and battle, an inability to admit defeat is a fatal problem too.

I think that deep vulnerability is a necessity for growth and development. A unwaveringly dominant and powerful person can refuse to admit defeat or error. They can have a certain defensiveness and lack of self-honesty that is an insurmountable barrier to real progress. If you win every fight, or fail to admit that you lost some fights, you're far less likely to take a step back and analyze or admit to any weakness or problems in yourself, and this stifles growth and breeds complacency.

To reverse things a bit (in light of Nietzsche's ideas), Christianity can also been seen as an often dominating and power-based force. It denies error, it tries through sheer domination and power to progress. It forces itself into the minds of the poor, the weak, the ignorant, the young. It thrives on faith and strong unquestionable pronouncements. Science on the other hand, for example, which is open to admitting error, which doesn't try to push ideas merely with power and domination, which is self-examining, has far outstripped Christianity in its ability to make progress and perfect itself.

I have pointed out in the past that a characteristic I have noted in many males is a strong psychological defensiveness and denial that seems to be a direct result of their struggle for power and domination. At the upper end of this is the alpha male type, and he is one of the least reflective and least self-honest creatures on the planet. His lack of philosophical progress, let alone psychological insight, is clear to anyone. Domination and power are simply not often happy bedfellows with doubt and admitting weakness or error, and there is a big price to pay for this.

I think there is a certain balance that needs to be reached for real progress and greatness. The battle with the outside world, with the other, is only half the struggle, the internal battle is where things really heat up.

Iolaus wrote:Oh, David, David, David.
There's lots of empirical evidence of a life after death, of a 'spiritual' world (for lack of a better term). You just pick and choose which evidence you want to see.

There is also a lot of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster and various appearances of the Virgin Mary. It doesn't mean that the evidence is credible, or holds up under investigation.

I'm open to the possibility of life after death, but I have to say that the evidence I've seen so far has been very flimsy and the people who promote the theory have been very flakey.

It all smells of insecure egos wishing the world to be a certain way.

Unless you have stumbled upon a wide-ranging body of consistent, compelling evidence put forward by intelligent people, it is unlikely you will be able to persuade me to think differently on this.

Advances in neuroscience are increasingly revealing the neurological and psychological basis for the kinds of visions and experiences people have with respect to life after death. These advances are creating a strong body of evidence which is hard to ignore.

More importantly, belief in life after death is wholly irrelevant to the spiritual path of opening one's mind to the nature of Reality. If anything, it forms a hindrance because it robs people of the urgency to seek this wisdom before they die.

Iolaus wrote:

The very fact that, in a godless universe, everyone is free to get away with whatever they want is precisely what makes having faith in truth so remarkable.

Aside from that being untrue, it gives me the sort of clue I look for (sometimes I openly ask but NEVER get an honest response) as to what satisfactions people get from atheism. They enjoy a stark and searing story, in this case you are the hero and superior to most others.

Atheists would laugh at the idea that I'm an atheist. Only the other day I was ticked off by a few people for using the word "God" too much.

Atheism is certainly a lot closer to truth than the belief in a creator God, but it still falls short by a long way. I've yet to meet an atheist who understands the nature of God, for example, or is even aware that they are lacking such an understanding.

Aside from this, I can't relate to anything you said here.

But I do not think any of us are ultimately better than others, we are all completely equal, only unequal in our development and placement on the path to wisdom/God.

No argument from me there.

[I might add that I also tremble at the thought of how many Christians have no desire for an uplifting cosmos and deity, but prefer the stark and searing story of a merciless egotist of a God and a universe of permanent unhealable misery. They don't want a good God or good news, they want drama, with high stakes and winners and losers.]

They want to feel special, yes.

Iolaus wrote:

Having faith in truth with no prospect of reward - that is amazing, out of this world.

It's a good point, but you are definitely kidding yourself if you think you do anything without seeking reward. Certainly not this. You have the reward of an exalted opinion of yourself, an amazing, out of this world person you are!

I couldn't care less about such things.

I merely happen to think that faith in truth is an amazing thing, no matter who engages in it. It involves casting aside the entire history of the Universe, as though it wasn't even there.

-

David Quinn wrote:There is also a lot of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster and various appearances of the Virgin Mary. It doesn't mean that the evidence is credible, or holds up under investigation.

I'm open to the possibility of life after death, but I have to say that the evidence I've seen so far has been very flimsy and the people who promote the theory have been very flakey.

It all smells of insecure egos wishing the world to be a certain way.

There is also a lot of evidence that there is a beagle called Snoopy who fights WWI air battles in a Sopwith Camel that looks suspiciously like a doghouse. That didn't hold up under my investigation, either.

Hey, why don't we team up as private eyes, David? You and me. Think of all the ridiculous myths we could debunk!

You are equating your soul with the Loch Ness Monster. That's some investigation.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

Jason wrote:

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Nietzsche has explored that one endlessly by pointing out this supposed "own conscience" is completely defined by the remains of Christianity in our culture.

Much of a person's conscience is the product of the culture in which they are raised, I don't know about "completely" though. A part of it may be innate, genetically encoded, perhaps as behaviours which help social animals operate productively together.

True enough. But in the same vein one could claim that Christianity might be genetically encoded as well, to help 'social animals' to behave and cope, and so on. Chicken or egg (and the rooster) again.

How could you claim that? Christianity was completely unknown by plenty of cultures for over a millennia after Christ, despite those peoples sharing the same genome as Christians. And of course Christianity didn't exist pre 2K years ago despite the fact that there has apparently been insignificant genetic change in humans for much longer than that.

Also, further to address the idea that conscience is "completely defined" by the remains of Christianity, I'd argue that parts of culture and socialization are not religious per se, and they also impact on the conscience. It's probably a messy job to try to separate religion from culture and socialization, but what about things like art, law, government, authorities, parents, relationships, other non-religious institutions etc. These things help form conscience yet aren't always really or fully religious exactly.

"Don't hit Mummy!"

Is that religious? Yet I'd bet it shapes the conscience.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

Jason wrote: An atheist/agnostic doesn't believe in god, the deity, the being, so the universe is very much godless. There's still a lot that is lost when god the deity is eradicated, even though the conscience may step in to take on some of god's functions.

My view on this is that a lot was lost when god the deity was created and nothing lost when eradicated, some tidying up perhaps. My stand would be that god is way more than being some deity, he's usually experienced by deists in what actually happens (the 'good' in people, conscience, reason, seeing the difference between good and bad). By removing the deity concept alone nothing really changes, not for a believer and not for an atheist.

I was thinking about the loss of things like heaven, hell, immortality, sin, soul, absolute morality, absolute purpose etc.

There are many Christians these days who don't even believe in deities but still have their church, rituals, theology and spirituality. The issues are not so much linked as commonly believed.

I think you may have done a lot more study and analysis of these issues than I have, it's not something I've paid much attention to, but I'd suggest that a lot of Christianity these days has been heavily influenced by atheistic and secular attitudes. Many of them will deny it though, but Christianity has been neutered you might say. Subjectivity and relativity has really taken a hold, god nowdays is so often "my god." Instead of the clergy and Bible defining god, there is a large movement toward "I feel that god is...." and "I feel that god would...." Many have managed to graft moral relativity and subjectivity onto their Christianity.

So the lack of contrast one might perceive between believing in god and not believing in god, is, I'd somewhat ignorantly theorize, partly down to the fact that Christians these days have deserted everything that was Christianity and a sincere consistent belief in an all-powerful judgemental absolute deity. It is perhaps they who have morphed almost into modern atheists, thus making the loss of the deity appear much less significant. Maybe that's what you're saying...

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

Jason wrote:Where does the nihilist get his motivation to smash the 'tables'? Is he alone somehow cut off from the forces of conscience that he was initially controlled by? Would it not be relatively easy to argue that his supposed table smashing is merely the result of a certain type of tangled conscience too?

It could be argued some tangled conscience remains. It's simpler to see the last smash as ultimate consequence of the willingness toward truth. Not all nihilists are truth seekers though. One can have different motivations to smash the initial tables. Anger problems, fear, laziness or greed for example.

It would certainly take a lot of drive and determination to 'smash the tables' of conscience, and if that determination is powered by a desire for truth I'd describe this act of smashing as just more work of conscience.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

Jason wrote:I understand(or more accurately often choose to use as a premise) that my actions are motivated by self-interest and probably largely imparted into me by my culture, but why would one then take the step to eradicate absolutely all their inherited conscience? There can be full understanding of the nature of conscience without this eradication step. Does Nietzsche propose eradicating it all, and what is his reasoning for doing so?

An answer to that would become a bit too involved. One has to define way more precise what conscience is and isn't before talking about eradicating anything. By the way, I didn't mean eradicating conscience, I was talking about damaged conscience, ie not truthful.

What is damaged conscience exactly? Can you explain it more and give me some examples. Sounds interesting.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

Jason wrote:Diebert, are you a nihilist? Do you propose nihilism? I get the sense that you rather rarely propose solid statements of action or judgement.(I'm not saying that your lack of 'solidity' is why you might be a nihilist, rather, I am hoping for you to put forward a solid statement that in this case just happens to be about nihilism.)

Nihilism is a necessary evil. Not alone as sign of the times but also as more personal stage one goes through when we start to doubt everything we used to rely on. It can create a lot of uglyness and smallness, despair even perhaps. Or it can shut down the mind almost completely.

What is nihilism's worth then, in your opinion?

brokenhead:

I'm not sure what you mean by "empirically provisional."

An act of sheer desperation. My usual language didn’t seem to be getting very far. :)

If you mean do I look around me and see an abundance of what I take to be empirical evidence that God exists? The answer is yes. I have said so many times here at GF.

I think you have used a false analogy. I am interested in seeing if you can come up with one that works, however.

You imply that my assumption that I will exist is analogous with your belief in God; that your experiences substantiate, not prove, your belief---apparently just as my experiences substantiate and do not prove that I will exist in the future. I tell you that, logically, I assume I will exist in the future on the basis of past conditions/causes of my existence.

What I am asking you, therefore, is: what are the provisional conditions/causes for the belief in your God?

But I also have admitted that the same things do not necessarily appear as evidence of God to everyone or anyone else, or even as evidence of anything at all. To me this is inexplicable.

What would evidence be without proof?

brokenhead wrote:

David Quinn wrote:There is also a lot of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster and various appearances of the Virgin Mary. It doesn't mean that the evidence is credible, or holds up under investigation.

There is also a lot of evidence that there is a beagle called Snoopy who fights WWI air battles in a Sopwith Camel that looks suspiciously like a doghouse. That didn't hold up under my investigation, either.

You seem to be missing the point by a mile. Iolaus wrote specifically: "There's lots of empirical evidence of a life after death, of a 'spiritual' world". This is something she beliefs but it's just not true. There might be puzzling indicators that haven't been explained but in terms of the scientific method there's really nothing credible out there at the moment. Tantalizing perhaps, like there's very interesting Loch Ness stuff too, not to be dismissed but certainly not to be called credible when scientific standards are maintained, which can be I admit a bit rigid. They are rigid for a reason of course, to counter the subconscious biases of faith when they're not appropriate.

David wrote:

"Advances in neuroscience are increasingly revealing the neurological and psychological basis for the kinds of visions and experiences people have with respect to life after death. These advances are creating a strong body of evidence which is hard to ignore.

"More importantly, belief in life after death is wholly irrelevant to the spiritual path of opening one's mind to the nature of Reality. If anything, it forms a hindrance because it robs people of the urgency to seek this wisdom before they die."

It is more of the same that comes from humanists and materialists like Corliss Lamont in The Illusion of Immortality. When you read the arguments of pure materialism, they are clean and straight and pure. They describe things exactly the way they are. They completely undermine any sense of a deity, a spiritual body, a spiritual spark.

But there is another order of experience possible: visionary experience. Where you 'see' beyond the way things are and are introduced to other possibilities, outlandish as they might be.

For example, the way I have seen it, we are not really in bodies, we are not really in this world, we are in fact part and parcel of the some pure consciousness of 'God' that has always existed and will always exist. No one seems to know why this 'God' exists or why it comes about that God plays with the creation of whole worlds and universes (which are only 'real' in a certain sense, when the fabric underneath this 'reality' is just the pure consciousness of God), but here we are anyway, in this one peculiar 'world' or 'loka', dealing with all these things, and seemingly trying to bridge what it is that separates us from this utterly inexplicable divine consciousness.

The nature of God's game of hide and seek, if you will, is that no matter how far we go into the manifestation, a sort of fantastically intricate dream, there will never be an end to it: the levels of intricacy will always expand out in front of us. We move through one layer and there is another layer. But in all of it, what we never seem to be able to get, except in glimpses, is that we ourselves are 'condensations of consciousness' from a completely and radically different level of being who come into this manifestation, and partake of this material life. But we are not *really* here and never were really here. The way that this happens, and the fact that it is like that, is a mystery that is deeply guarded. Just about the whole world is ignorant of this peculiar fact, and it sort of has to be that way.

To come into manifestation, to have condensed as consciousness into this material stuff, is all about entering into the 'story' of the world, and about participating in all the different 'stories' that go on. The best story is the story of the road home, and it is a 'story' heralded by strangely beautiful signs and omens, a road that begins when certain idea-knots begin to unravel, and when one begins to relinquish one's own personal will.

On the other side of that rainbow, David, your spiritual Mother holds you in her loving arms and she coos to you as you gurgle and sputter!

Now would be an excellent moment to begin the correspondence course, David. Due to your complex karma I can't shave even a penny off the suggested retail price, but with your order I will include my brilliant pamphlet: Mercurius: Prophetic Voice from the Garbage Heap of Meaning which you are sure to enjoy and it comes bound in leatherette with its own slip-case. I have lovingly inscribed your copy and will get it off to you with your order!

Jason wrote:

"...but I'd suggest that a lot of Christianity these days has been heavily influenced by atheistic and secular attitudes. Many of them will deny it though, but Christianity has been neutered you might say."

And that is exactly why Nietzsche recognizes that 'God is dead'. (And we killed Him).

Diebert wrote:You seem to be missing the point by a mile. Iolaus wrote specifically: "There's lots of empirical evidence of a life after death, of a 'spiritual' world". This is something she beliefs but it's just not true.

But how do you know it's not true? Trust me, Diebert, I am not missing the point at all. David throws in the Loch Ness Monster. I throw in Snoopy. He started it.

David,

There is also a lot of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster and various appearances of the Virgin Mary. It doesn't mean that the evidence is credible, or holds up under investigation.

The appearance of the Virgin Mary for those 3 girls in South America sometime early in the past century, or was it near WWII, is confirmed. Too many people saw it. What it means, tho, and whether there is such a persona as the virgin Mary is surely up for grabs, but that many people saw a fantastic event is not. What this tells us is that our world is not quite so cut and dried as many would like to think.

I'm open to the possibility of life after death, but I have to say that the evidence I've seen so far has been very flimsy and the people who promote the theory have been very flakey.

There's two things. One is that people prefer to agree with evidence that they have a prior preference for, and emotion/desire is a strong precursor to what the so-called 'objective' mind will accept. This is why I have tried to understand what emotional rewards people get from having a stout and immovable 'materialistic' worldview.

Second is that I think there is a misunderstanding from large segments of humanity about what to expect for evidence. This is really where science ultimately is already making inroads and I hope will solve the problem. Let me explain my worldview.

Reality if all of a piece, there is no division nor any such thing as the nonmaterial, yet it is more accurate to call the whole shebang spiritual. So there is only the spiritual world.

Just as we know that there is a tiny world of things much too small to see, and a spectrum of electromagnetism that we can neither feel nor see but which can emit energies that can kill us - so there is a lot more to reality than what our senses can pick up on. When people say there is no evidence for spirit or soul or God or consciousness independent of a brain, they are making an error of expecting the evidence to fit into the spectrum area which we can easily see, but of course it can't be found there. It's like saying, "I see no evidence that there are xrays!"

You believe in the unity of all reality, but how? Through the thing called ether, that's how. So I've got this book by Ervin Lazslo called "Science and the Akashic Field" that's pretty good on the topic. I came to my understanding of the unity of all reality and of something like the traditional ether due to a powerful spiritual awakening many years ago, and as I began to read and read to try to make sense of what happened to me, I have found my personal intuitions corroborated many times by some pretty famous people and thought systems. I believe it was Victor on that other board who said, "Oh, you believe in the ether. Michelson Morley disproved it." What's the ether, I wondered? So I googled the Michelson Morley experiment in Wiki and read about it. It was well done, but it was quite obvious to me that the experiment was utterly incapable of finding the true ether. Their hope was premature because only now are some scientists even beginning to get some more subtle experiments going.

David, if everything is not one seamless whole, then things are separate. If they are not separate, then how does it work? Isn't it absurd to suppose that we know everything now, just because in the past two hundred years or so we have finally began to make a little progress beyond our physical bodily senses?

It all smells of insecure egos wishing the world to be a certain way.

But we can also say that our fundamental desire to be immortal might mean that we are.

Unless you have stumbled upon a wide-ranging body of consistent, compelling evidence put forward by intelligent people, it is unlikely you will be able to persuade me to think differently on this.

Oh, well, I do feel that I have stumbled on just that, but I can't really put it together right now. Certainly it is put forward by many intelligent people.

It's my opinion that many events traditionally called spiritual are taking place in another dimension, one to which we have little access. It might even be the same dimension studied in particle physics known as the quantum realm. On one hand, reality seems to be a smooth continuum, like the electromagnetic spectrum, but on the other hand, we find that in nature there are buildups to discrete jumps. The boiling point of water is one. I've had the thought that perhaps the Planck length is the gateway into the next smaller dimension, the quantum particle dimension. And it's interesting to realize that while in one way we don't have access to it, in another way we are bathed in it and made up of it. It's just that we can't easily watch how it works.

Advances in neuroscience are increasingly revealing the neurological and psychological basis for the kinds of visions and experiences people have with respect to life after death. These advances are creating a strong body of evidence which is hard to ignore.

Many of them have accurately reported physical events when their bodily senses were shut down. There is great consistency to the process of getting out of the body itself.

I speak of the spiritual faculty being activated. I suspect that this is not merely the 'soul' which can leave the body, but an actual area of the brain. So long as we are in the body itself, we will experience everything mediated through the brain. That's what its for. But the brain has many capabilities.

More importantly, belief in life after death is wholly irrelevant to the spiritual path of opening one's mind to the nature of Reality. If anything, it forms a hindrance because it robs people of the urgency to seek this wisdom before they die.

I experience it differently. Perhaps I would still seek wisdom if I thought I had no future or spirit, but likely I'd spend a lot of time battling feelings of futility. And I'd have a little more fear (I've got enough already!).

But if we have a life after death it means a tremendous amount about the nature of Reality. That would be some pretty relevant data.

Atheism is certainly a lot closer to truth than the belief in a creator God, but it still falls short by a long way. I've yet to meet an atheist who understands the nature of God, for example, or is even aware that they are lacking such an understanding.

I agree in spades. But are the theists much better off?

I couldn't care less about such things.

You mean your entire endeavor is not just a huge intellectual edifice to compensate for your inadequacies??!!!

Well I never.

I merely happen to think that faith in truth is an amazing thing, no matter who engages in it.

What I find poignant is how little it matters what belief system the truth seeker thinks he subscribes to. He either goes for the ride or gets off. We live in a humorous universe.

It involves casting aside the entire history of the Universe, as though it wasn't even there.

Say what?

brokenhead wrote:

Diebert wrote:You seem to be missing the point by a mile. Iolaus wrote specifically: "There's lots of empirical evidence of a life after death, of a 'spiritual' world". This is something she beliefs but it's just not true.

But how do you know it's not true? Trust me, Diebert, I am not missing the point at all. David throws in the Loch Ness Monster. I throw in Snoopy. He started it.

You're still missing the point, which was not about life after death or the Loch Ness monster being not possibly true. By scientific standards, which seem very reasonable there's no conclusive evidence available. Snoopy however can easily be established to be a fictional character so cannot be compared really.

The overarching point is that there are issues bigger than the Loch Ness monster and larger than ones life and what might happen with your specific awareness or memories after it.

brokenhead wrote:You are equating your soul with the Loch Ness Monster. That's some investigation.

It's very similar. Some people believe they have sighted the soul, but as soon as the investigators arrive there is no longer any sign of it. Some people try to fake evidence, but that is quickly seen through. Some people are tricked by optical illusions, as it were, by shadows and quirks of light, into believing that they have seen the soul. Some are so desperate to believe in it that their minds are driven to whip up a powerful illusion of the soul for their benefit and they become convinced that they have objectively seen it.

Of course, in using the word "soul" here, I'm talking about that spooky, disembodied entity that Christians and their ilk want to believe in. I'm not talking about how a wise person might use the term - for example, as a poetic reference to one's conscious connection to Reality.

-

Alex Jacob wrote:David wrote:

"Advances in neuroscience are increasingly revealing the neurological and psychological basis for the kinds of visions and experiences people have with respect to life after death. These advances are creating a strong body of evidence which is hard to ignore.

"More importantly, belief in life after death is wholly irrelevant to the spiritual path of opening one's mind to the nature of Reality. If anything, it forms a hindrance because it robs people of the urgency to seek this wisdom before they die."

It is more of the same that comes from humanists and materialists like Corliss Lamont in The Illusion of Immortality. When you read the arguments of pure materialism, they are clean and straight and pure. They describe things exactly the way they are. They completely undermine any sense of a deity, a spiritual body, a spiritual spark.

But there is another order of experience possible: visionary experience. Where you 'see' beyond the way things are and are introduced to other possibilities, outlandish as they might be.

For example, the way I have seen it, we are not really in bodies, we are not really in this world, we are in fact part and parcel of the some pure consciousness of 'God' that has always existed and will always exist. No one seems to know why this 'God' exists or why it comes about that God plays with the creation of whole worlds and universes (which are only 'real' in a certain sense, when the fabric underneath this 'reality' is just the pure consciousness of God), but here we are anyway, in this one peculiar 'world' or 'loka', dealing with all these things, and seemingly trying to bridge what it is that separates us from this utterly inexplicable divine consciousness.

The nature of God's game of hide and seek, if you will, is that no matter how far we go into the manifestation, a sort of fantastically intricate dream, there will never be an end to it: the levels of intricacy will always expand out in front of us. We move through one layer and there is another layer. But in all of it, what we never seem to be able to get, except in glimpses, is that we ourselves are 'condensations of consciousness' from a completely and radically different level of being who come into this manifestation, and partake of this material life. But we are not *really* here and never were really here. The way that this happens, and the fact that it is like that, is a mystery that is deeply guarded. Just about the whole world is ignorant of this peculiar fact, and it sort of has to be that way.

To come into manifestation, to have condensed as consciousness into this material stuff, is all about entering into the 'story' of the world, and about participating in all the different 'stories' that go on. The best story is the story of the road home, and it is a 'story' heralded by strangely beautiful signs and omens, a road that begins when certain idea-knots begin to unravel, and when one begins to relinquish one's own personal will.

On the other side of that rainbow, David, your spiritual Mother holds you in her loving arms and she coos to you as you gurgle and sputter!

I have no problem with anything you say here, provided that it is realized that it just a first step towards enlightenment and by no means the final story.

Breaking the spell of materialism and realizing that everything is an intangible creation of consciousness, including oneself, is a critical breakthrough to make and lays the foundations for further understanding and development to take place. But if one doesn't eventually move on from this breakthrough and actually go down that path of increasing understanding and development, then one’s awareness and spirituality will remain very limited, no matter how many visions and subtle experiences and encounters with spirit guides one might have.

This is where you and I part company. For you, exploring the next stage beyond materialism is all you seem to be interested in. That is how I see your "shamanism". A desire to squeeze everything possible out of the post-materialistic phase of perception, coupled with a reluctance or fear to go beyond this phase and really knuckle down to understand the nature of Reality in the clearest possible manner.

It is a bit like a child receiving a dazzling new toy and wanting to play with it all the time, day after day. That's fine, play with it all you want. Get as much as you can from it. But there comes a time when you have to leave it behind and move on.

Unfortunately, most people who dwell in this realm never do move on. They find it far too dazzling and seductive to even contemplate leaving it behind.

-

Iolaus wrote:David,

There is also a lot of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster and various appearances of the Virgin Mary. It doesn't mean that the evidence is credible, or holds up under investigation.

The appearance of the Virgin Mary for those 3 girls in South America sometime early in the past century, or was it near WWII, is confirmed. Too many people saw it. What it means, tho, and whether there is such a persona as the virgin Mary is surely up for grabs, but that many people saw a fantastic event is not. What this tells us is that our world is not quite so cut and dried as many would like to think.

That sort of thing is easily explained in terms of social conditioning, subliminal messaging, group pressure, mass hysteria, individual gullibility, mental projection, etc.

Check out some Derren Brown clips on youtube. He shows how easy it is to subtly manipulate people into seeing what he wants them to see and demonstrates how powerful subliminal messaging can be. It is very educational.

Just as we know that there is a tiny world of things much too small to see, and a spectrum of electromagnetism that we can neither feel nor see but which can emit energies that can kill us - so there is a lot more to reality than what our senses can pick up on. When people say there is no evidence for spirit or soul or God or consciousness independent of a brain, they are making an error of expecting the evidence to fit into the spectrum area which we can easily see, but of course it can't be found there. It's like saying, "I see no evidence that there are xrays!"

You believe in the unity of all reality, but how? Through the thing called ether, that's how. So I've got this book by Ervin Lazslo called "Science and the Akashic Field" that's pretty good on the topic. I came to my understanding of the unity of all reality and of something like the traditional ether due to a powerful spiritual awakening many years ago, and as I began to read and read to try to make sense of what happened to me, I have found my personal intuitions corroborated many times by some pretty famous people and thought systems. I believe it was Victor on that other board who said, "Oh, you believe in the ether. Michelson Morley disproved it." What's the ether, I wondered? So I googled the Michelson Morley experiment in Wiki and read about it. It was well done, but it was quite obvious to me that the experiment was utterly incapable of finding the true ether. Their hope was premature because only now are some scientists even beginning to get some more subtle experiments going.

David, if everything is not one seamless whole, then things are separate. If they are not separate, then how does it work? Isn't it absurd to suppose that we know everything now, just because in the past two hundred years or so we have finally began to make a little progress beyond our physical bodily senses?

In a scientific/empirical sense, you are right. We still have much to learn about the empirical realities of the world. But philosophically, introspectively and logically, it is possible to go utterly beyond those kinds of restrictions and comprehend the nature of Reality fully. Issues such as whether there is life after death or whether there is a personal God become meaningless to the person performs this spiritual act.

It is like waking up from a dream and observing the oh-so-important concerns that one had during the dream disappear into a puff of unreality.

Iolaus wrote:

It all smells of insecure egos wishing the world to be a certain way.

But we can also say that our fundamental desire to be immortal might mean that we are.

Immortality means seeing through the illusion of life and death and realizing that one has never come into existence in the first place. It doesn’t mean existing forever as a finite self - which is impossible in this ever-changing world of ours. The finite self has no more existence than a mirage, and has just as much chance of existing forever as any other mirage has.

Iolaus wrote:

Advances in neuroscience are increasingly revealing the neurological and psychological basis for the kinds of visions and experiences people have with respect to life after death. These advances are creating a strong body of evidence which is hard to ignore.

Many of them have accurately reported physical events when their bodily senses were shut down. There is great consistency to the process of getting out of the body itself.

Check out Susan Blackmore’s material. She scientifically studied out-of-body experiences ever since she had a massive out-of-body experience herself, and in the process changed from being a believer to a skeptic. In short, she no longer believes in the religious interpretation of them. She found that neurological factors were perfectly adequate to explain every aspect of the experience.

She was a guest on the Reasoning Show last year, where these issues were explored.

Iolaus wrote:

More importantly, belief in life after death is wholly irrelevant to the spiritual path of opening one's mind to the nature of Reality. If anything, it forms a hindrance because it robs people of the urgency to seek this wisdom before they die.

I experience it differently. Perhaps I would still seek wisdom if I thought I had no future or spirit, but likely I'd spend a lot of time battling feelings of futility. And I'd have a little more fear (I've got enough already!).

But if we have a life after death it means a tremendous amount about the nature of Reality. That would be some pretty relevant data.

No more so than concluding that there will be life after today.

Whether one’s life is confined to this particular biological incarnation or extends to include numerous other incarnations, the same core spiritual issue needs to be addressed – namely, how to pierce maya and go beyond life and death. One could live through an infinite number of incarnations and still not be any closer to Reality, if that core issue isn’t addressed.

What I find poignant is how little it matters what belief system the truth seeker thinks he subscribes to. He either goes for the ride or gets off. We live in a humorous universe.

Yes, having faith in truth has nothing to do with subscribing to beliefs. Rather, it means knowing how to go beyond all beliefs and ridding consciousness of all delusion.

Iolaus wrote:

It involves casting aside the entire history of the Universe, as though it wasn't even there.

Say what?

Going sideways, as it were. Side-stepping out of it all.

And then coming back and embracing it all in an entirely different manner.

-

Just a note to say that I'll be away for a few weeks and won't be able to address any of your responses until I get back.

-

Yes, David is traveling to the States, to do some handyman work around my house.

How much is that costing you?

David Quinn wrote:

brokenhead wrote:You are equating your soul with the Loch Ness Monster. That's some investigation.

-The Mighty Quinn-
Some people believe they have sighted the soul,

-tomas-
October 26th, 2004. Seeing is believing. Count me a see'er. I've seen my 2nd cousin's, Julie's soul, depart her dying body.




-The Mighty Quinn-
but as soon as the investigators arrive there is no longer any sign of it.

-tomas-
Oh my, "the investigators", like wowser man, they are something special on this earth, yeah right.




-The Mighty Quinn-
Some people try to fake evidence, but that is quickly seen through.

-tomas-
The weak-minded, of course.




-The Mighty Quinn-
Some people are tricked by optical illusions, as it were, by shadows and quirks of light, into believing that they have seen the soul.

-tomas-
This sentence needs some cleaning up.




-The Mighty Quinn-
Some are so desperate to believe in it that their minds are driven to whip up a powerful illusion of the soul for their benefit and they become convinced that they have objectively seen it.

-tomas-
This sentence sounds like a bad LSD trip.




-The Mighty Quinn-
Of course, in using the word "soul" here, I'm talking about that spooky, disembodied entity that Christians and their ilk want to believe in.

-tomas-
Please put a bit more wordage into "that spooky, disembodied entity" please.

"Christians" is a many multi-faceted terminology-word. Are you referring to the one of Germanic origins?




The Mighty Quinn-
I'm not talking about how a wise person might use the term - for example, as a poetic reference to one's conscious connection to Reality.

-tomas-
I 'know' what I saw, heard, said.



.

Well!

What state?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/78/17685 ... 40.jpg?v=0

http://www.alexgrey.com

I was making a play on Kevin's trip a year ago to Florida to trim Elizabeth's trees.

Carl G wrote:I was making a play on Kevin's trip a year ago to Florida to trim Elizabeth's bush.

Fixed for hysteria mongering.

David wrote:

"Breaking the spell of materialism and realizing that everything is an intangible creation of consciousness, including oneself, is a critical breakthrough to make and lays the foundations for further understanding and development to take place. But if one doesn't eventually move on from this breakthrough and actually go down that path of increasing understanding and development, then one’s awareness and spirituality will remain very limited, no matter how many visions and subtle experiences and encounters with spirit guides one might have."

Okay, but it always seems that everyone comes up with an intricate 'praxis' to be performed in relation to 'the vision', or the glimpse however sideways it might be, into 'the nature of things'.

My way of seeing things is that people get very dramatic, like Moses in front of the Burning Bush and from out of the whirlwind with lightening flashes and thunder God gives orders. The demands that your 'God' places on you are peculiarly rigorous, they are dramatic and colored with your ideas about what outrageous, daring, ascetic acts you must perform to appease this God, and so pass the test, and achieve Freedom.

In Paramahansa Yogananda's Bhagavad-Gita interpretation he describes Arjuna's revelation as a diagram, as a formula, as a yoga for reversing incarnation, meaning to engage in practices that are the opposite of those that got us into this mess in the first place. Though maybe it is true that to move beyond the confines of this plane of existence we have to be weaned of materialism and we have to learn to live in 'spirit' ('higher consciousness'), the way I see things is that the whole thing hinges upon Grace, and when you say we 'part company' at a certain point---you with your staff of wisdom standing on the craggy path in a beam of harsh light with the windblown sky as your backdrop, as you leave all humanity behind to scale the mountain of impossibility---my God does not require this. I just don't respond to that drama, and I feel that I saw through it.

So, what does my 'God' require? What accomplishment stands before me? How many triple backward flips must I perform before the Heavenly Judges give me a Perfect 10 and allow me to pass by? The only real activity, the only thing that needs to be done, is to be kind. One is still in a body, one still has one's life to live, one will still have to leave life through death, but along the way, as I have seen it, the act that gives the most merit is so utterly simple in concept that we often overlook it. 'Don't do unto others what is hateful to you---all the rest is commentary'.

"This is where you and I part company. For you, exploring the next stage beyond materialism is all you seem to be interested in. That is how I see your "shamanism". A desire to squeeze everything possible out of the post-materialistic phase of perception, coupled with a reluctance or fear to go beyond this phase and really knuckle down to understand the nature of Reality in the clearest possible manner."

Actually it is more accurate to say that you ridicule the idea that I presented in the form of a story using the term 'shaman' and 'shamanism'. You and the QRS are a snooty bunch of boys who have an exclusive treefort clubhouse. Though you think you are on some other, higher plane, and you look down on what I write---on the dispensations that Alex Jacob lays at your feet asking only stupid little material dollars in return---I rather think the more important part escapes you.

You are still locked into a story, David, and everyone who lives has a story to live. Everyone can look at their story and discover the guiding lines out of which it is constructed, one story can be penetrated by another story and open up into different vistas. I think perhaps that the solar myths are maybe just inherently 'sweet', and the flavor of the elixir is just completely different. You are just as tied up in the elements of your story as anyone, more so in a way, but your story is 'special' and harsh. Your 'God' is an impersonal God and so the path set before you is always cold and harsh.

'Why do you have to make it so HARD!', asks your Divine Mother. If anything could ever be different, and if we ever wanted it to be different, all we have to do is to ASK for it to be different. God will never invade our personal space, the realm of our choices. We have to ask.

Jason wrote:

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:

Jason wrote: Much of a person's conscience is the product of the culture in which they are raised, I don't know about "completely" though. A part of it may be innate, genetically encoded, perhaps as behaviours which help social animals operate productively together.

True enough. But in the same vein one could claim that Christianity might be genetically encoded as well, to help 'social animals' to behave and cope, and so on. Chicken or egg (and the rooster) again.

How could you claim that? Christianity was completely unknown by plenty of cultures for over a millennia after Christ, despite those peoples sharing the same genome as Christians. And of course Christianity didn't exist pre 2K years ago despite the fact that there has apparently been insignificant genetic change in humans for much longer than that.

You were suggesting part of the culture one is raised in might be "innate" or genetically encoded. I'm not sure why you then turn around and say Christianity cannot be encoded in the same way. Perhaps it was not as obvious as I thought that with Christianity I was referring to a set of behaviors that could be named or justified differently in other times.

but what about things like art, law, government, authorities, parents, relationships, other non-religious institutions etc. These things help form conscience yet aren't always really or fully religious exactly.

As you say, it's hard to separate the issues especially because the Church and Christian dogma have been mostly separated from many other social institutions since a while now. For example we could trace much of law and science back to Greece, Egypt and the Arab empires but at the same time Christian scholars, monks and thinkers have been shaped by those influences too.

"Don't hit Mummy!"

Is that religious? Yet I'd bet it shapes the conscience.

It's surprising how much laws for protection of the weaker have originally always been the domain of religion. Invoking the wrath of will of God or gods might have been the only way to convince barely conscious people to have a bit more order and a bit stronger social cohesion?

What is damaged conscience exactly? Can you explain it more and give me some examples. Sounds interesting.

The term comes from Nietzsche originally when he talks about bad conscience. Freud used the idea as well by the way. ""All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward." "

Here some words of Nietzsche from the Genealogy of Moral that might be interesting.

First about good conscience.

The haughty knowing of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over oneself and destiny, has sunken into the lowest depth of him and grown instinctual, has become instinct, a dominating instinct: — what will he call it, this dominating instinct, assuming that he finds he needs a word for it? There’s no doubt: the sovereign man calls this instinct his conscience. . . .

Then about bad conscience

But then how did those other “shadowy affairs,” the consciousness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience” come into the world? — And with this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I’ll say it once more — or have I not said anything about it yet? — they are good for nothing. A few moments of inner, merely "modern" experience; no knowledge of and no desire to know the past; even less any historical instinct, or the even necessarily “second sight” - and then still pushing the tale of morality: this must of course end with results that are standing in a nothing but brittle relationship with the truth.

You will already have guessed what really went on with all this and under all this: that will to self-torment, that cruelty of inner creating, of the restrained animal man, imprisoned in the “state” to make him tame, who invented bad conscience in order to pain himself, after the more natural discharge of this will to inflict pain had been blocked — this man of bad conscience seized upon religious assumptions to drive his self-torment into its most horrifying hardship and ferocity. Guilt towards God: this idea becomes his instrument of torture.

In “God” he seizes on the ultimate contrast he is capable of discovering to his real and indissoluble animal instincts. He interprets these animal instincts themselves as a crime against God

All instincts which are not discharged to the outside are turned back inside — this is what I call the internalization of man. From this first grows in man what people later call his “soul.” The entire inner world, originally as thin as if stretched between two layers of skin, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, width, and height, to the extent that what a person discharged out into the world was obstructed. Those frightening fortifications with which the organization of the state protected itself against the old instincts for freedom — punishments belong above all to these fortifications — brought it about that all those instincts of the wild, free, roaming man turned themselves backwards, against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, joy in pursuit, in attack, in change, in destruction — all those turned themselves against the possessors of such instincts. That is the origin of “bad conscience.”

(all from the second essay of Genealogy of Morals: "Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters")

DQ wrote:That sort of thing is easily explained in terms of social conditioning, subliminal messaging, group pressure, mass hysteria, individual gullibility, mental projection, etc.

Your problem is that you buy into too many easy explanations, David. Unworthy of any real thinker, let alone a self-proclaimed enlightened one.