Spiritual questions answered here
- Thread starter zanket
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I still stand by the statement that: God is everything that is and everything that is not.
God is everything that is, which is love. God is also everything that is not, which is not love. The everything that is not is necessary for us to experience everything that is.
There is no such thing as nothing. Everything is energy. But there is the concept of nothingness, because it is necessary for us to experience this "everything".
God is everything that is, which is love. God is also everything that is not, which is not love. The everything that is not is necessary for us to experience everything that is.
There is no such thing as nothing. Everything is energy. But there is the concept of nothingness, because it is necessary for us to experience this "everything".
Raithere
As with the trees and other things. We can all see its interelatedness to us. Trees take in CO2 and gives off O2 and humans need O2 and give off CO2 etc. You can says trees are renewable, but it takes 300 years for a tree to reach its full photosynthesis potential, this is long enough to kill us all. Water is filtered naturally, but most of the world goes without clean water and is experiencing water shortage.
If the cats or more correctly, if anything other than being human don't exist that is the same if anything other than being 2 metres tall doesn't exist, you will not be able to experience being human or being 2 metres tall. Because that's all you know, without a reference point, you cannot know it experientially.
Denying you feeling and thoughts is denying the best tools for communication. But it doesn't matter, since you don't know them, you wouldn't know your lost. But again that doesn't matter either, you will get to know it eventually.
Admit this, all cell produce chemicals to carry out their functions and need cetain chemical for them to function in the first place. The basis are the same. It's like we humans are all different, but we are humans nevertheless.
As with the trees and other things. We can all see its interelatedness to us. Trees take in CO2 and gives off O2 and humans need O2 and give off CO2 etc. You can says trees are renewable, but it takes 300 years for a tree to reach its full photosynthesis potential, this is long enough to kill us all. Water is filtered naturally, but most of the world goes without clean water and is experiencing water shortage.
Yes and no. It is about population density and so on, but think in terms of interelateness. And no, it is not vastly exaggerated, observe clearer that so many people die everyday because of lack of clean water.
Our survival depend on The Earth's survival.
It has everything to do with spirituality. Spirituality is life and it's life we are trying to sustain.
But I'm afraid that you have taken the comforting position. Not believing in a concept due to the fact that you have no reason to believe otherwise is not at all accurate but incomplete. I know that you have stated many reasons for not believing, but all of the reasons falls short of being worthy of accurate prediction. Most reasons are incomplete explanation for why things are what they are at this moment. You are well versed in atom behavior and have divided the problem to the smallest component that you know..You are even willing to go into more detail and divide the smallest knowledge that you have even smaller....I'm afraid that putting back the peaces after dividing it so tiny would be an impossible task. We have not even completed life or predicted accurately the next day, so how can you accurately predict death if we can't even predict or understand life??
Have you reached a conclusion Raithere? Have you reached the point where you have decided to rest your thoughts on the issue of spirituality?
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You're still thinking classically. At the quantum level 'particles' travel as waves but sometimes behave like particles. The apparent solidity of matter is an emergent property of the interaction of energy and force; essentially it is illusory. Rather than billiard balls bouncing around on a pool table think of intersecting waves in a pond which can pass through one another.
Well, the basics of quantum physics are not really bleeding edge, they're about 80 years old. But I find the issue integral rather than academic. What I find particularly interesting is how it reflects the conclusions of certain philosophies, which makes me wonder if some of these principles are so intrinsic to the nature of reality that they are impossible to avoid or whether they are intrinsic to the nature of the mind that we perceive them regardless of their reality.
But what does such a duality mean? What does it convey about the nature of God besides incomprehensibility?
~Raithere
This discussion pertains nothing to spirituality. Whether we are dealing with atoms, waves, string theory versus classic quantum, you are still in the classic business of breaking the problem down instead of putting the picture together. Humanity is in the businees of breaking the problem down to bits and pieces.....Show us one theory that have successfully put a system like our universe with elements as large as planets and tiny as waves together. Don't show me the science of this universe, show me the engineering of this universe...and when you discover the engineering behind this universe and you will never be able to, you might finally understand the engineer.
Flores:
Let me turn that around and pose a question to you: If we should believe without reason how do we discriminate between the infinite possibilities? It's not that I believe my knowledge or reasoning is complete but rather that it is so incomplete, falls so magnificently short, that I can find no basis for discrimination without evidence or reason (and even this I am skeptical of). What I have attempted to do is pare things down to the barest of essentials, to minimize my surety to only that which I am quite certain of or cannot do without.
This is why I come across as such a hard-core skeptic; I would still be a nihilist except for the fact that I find nihilism discreditable. At some point I turned this corner to find that my reductionist approach had reversed. It's like walking south; if you walk far enough you wind up heading north without changing directions.
And this is where my quest ended; I had no need to go any further. It's not that I had solved all the riddles or even that I had figured out what the riddles were but that I had realized that the Universe, existence, is a coherent whole. Tiassa and I have touched upon this as the principle of unity though I don't know if he would agree with my expression of it here. I'm not sure I can even express it properly; it's a difficult conception to put into words. All terminology regarding it or any aspect of it is relative, it becomes primarily an expression of self in relation to what's around us; it's like attempting to find the center on the surface of a sphere or the beginning of a circle.
The problem is not one of terminology but of realization. The problem I have with the notion of duality that has cropped up here is that people are willing to rest upon it just as so many rest upon the assertion of god. They take it for something concrete, absolute, as a singular truth. Epiphany lies beyond.
Have I reached a conclusion? There are no conclusions.
~Raithere
Let me turn that around and pose a question to you: If we should believe without reason how do we discriminate between the infinite possibilities? It's not that I believe my knowledge or reasoning is complete but rather that it is so incomplete, falls so magnificently short, that I can find no basis for discrimination without evidence or reason (and even this I am skeptical of). What I have attempted to do is pare things down to the barest of essentials, to minimize my surety to only that which I am quite certain of or cannot do without.
This is why I come across as such a hard-core skeptic; I would still be a nihilist except for the fact that I find nihilism discreditable. At some point I turned this corner to find that my reductionist approach had reversed. It's like walking south; if you walk far enough you wind up heading north without changing directions.
And this is where my quest ended; I had no need to go any further. It's not that I had solved all the riddles or even that I had figured out what the riddles were but that I had realized that the Universe, existence, is a coherent whole. Tiassa and I have touched upon this as the principle of unity though I don't know if he would agree with my expression of it here. I'm not sure I can even express it properly; it's a difficult conception to put into words. All terminology regarding it or any aspect of it is relative, it becomes primarily an expression of self in relation to what's around us; it's like attempting to find the center on the surface of a sphere or the beginning of a circle.
The problem is not one of terminology but of realization. The problem I have with the notion of duality that has cropped up here is that people are willing to rest upon it just as so many rest upon the assertion of god. They take it for something concrete, absolute, as a singular truth. Epiphany lies beyond.
Have I reached a conclusion? There are no conclusions.
~Raithere
I had to think about this one, especially in light of Hevene’s comment.
Yes, I agree.
Hevene can still be right in her first sentence here:
...because God is still an "is-is not" thing at its absolute level, where it relates to nothing else. My way of putting the remainder: God divided itself into everything, creating relativity. The "is" aspect of God got divided into everything that God is, like love, and the "is not" aspect into everything that God is not, like fear. The relativity is necessary for us to experience everything, both everything that God is and everything that God is not. Through us, God experiences everything.
When I think about it deeper than that, fuses in my brain start to blow. I’ll leave it at this for now.
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Raithere, You seem to understand the concept of believe from a mathematical point of view to mean a believe that will achieve the same number on the left and right hand side of a very complicated equation. A unified answer.. That's not believe, That's proof of an existing system. You really have to distinguish between believe and proof, because the difference is the destiny and answer to the very core of our existance and our lives. Establishing a belief system is contingent to finding a proof, without a believe, there is no proof, and pen, paper, and blackboards are not the arena to solve the problem that you are interested in. The problem of life and death, the core reason and answer of your existance. Perhaps adequate to solve the problem of understanding gravity, motion, ect, but not fit to understand the problem of "Life purpose". Take this very simplistic example: A young scientist is scrolling through some old math books and found an equation in a rusty book that intrigued him. It intrigued him enough to generate a believe in him that this equation might answer an exiting riddle. He wrote a paper about his initial finding about the possibilities of that equation and his paper was denied because it was not main stream thought and not hot on the publication demands. The young scientist have infinite possibilities and infinite number of equations to look at, he can even go work on some bleeding edge theory and get a publication in. The young scientist doesn't find it in him to follow mainstem, he really believes that if he worked another five years on his rusty 200 year old equations that it will reveal something great. He risks his career and confine himself to an attic and work day and night for 10 years. So many errors and inconsistencies, and he still works to eliminate them. After twenty years, the equation is finally free from anomalies and he publishes his finding, and all of a sudden, everyone is interested again in the same equation that they denied for publication 10 years ago. He receives a nobel prize and all the other scientists that worked on that same issue that even had their ups before is now in the complete dust. They failed and he acheived...And we are not talking about life here, just a simplistic example.. What happened Raithere? What kept that man going? Why didn't he pursue the infinite possibilities that you speak of? Because he believed in whatever it is that he looked at hard enough to find a fit for it, while others followed well knowingly a route that brought intermediate answers and fame and lacked the final merit. Yes, we are not in the business of discovering anything. Everything already exist Raith, we are only understanding things and fitting equations to things. Gravity have always existed, and it's not waiting for an equation to describe it to start working. What is the equation (Belief) associated with every one of our lives, and what are we doing to proof it?
A perfectly engineered universe obviously exists and based on your knowledge of math, you know quite well that a unified theory to describe everything must have one and only one answer. Dualism is an inconsistency that implies incomprehensbility...Unity of the answer is a must in achieving a conclusive answer. So what is this unified answer, is there such a thing really? Let's say we found the equation to life and it contained all those forces, ect. Then what is the next step after finding a proof. It must be tested..Tested againest the infinite possibilites of creations. Let's assume that it works, then what? Can we change the equation of life? No we can't, because don't forget that it's a unified singular answer meaning there is no other answer that will fit again. So what have we achieved...?Everything and nothing at all, That's not dualism, it's a circle that point back to us. It's a circle that is supposed to show us that the answer is within each one of us. Our spirits contain the answer..but our lives are veiling us from it because our lives is the excercise of proofing our equation.
I'll write more later.
Perhaps. It is an interesting topic to me. I’ll bring this up in the physics forum.
“Everything and nothing” wasn’t meant to be profound. The “nothing” just represents empty space. Some might believe God is the stuff. Others might believe it’s the space between the stuff. In my description here, God reminds us that it is both the stuff and the space between.
The “is-is not” duality of God, on the other hand, conveys much about the nature of God, as explained above. God reminds us that it is both everything that is and everything that is not. An absolute entity (absolutely everything) defies description, for there is nothing to which it can relate itself. If it can’t be described, then it doesn’t exist.
Here are more things I’ve learned about spirituality--my version of it!--that may foster discussion. Some of these have already been mentioned but I include them for flow:
- Every path is a spiritual path.
- What you feel is your choice.
- You cannot fail to experience fullest glory, the sum of all feelings.
- Time and space are relative. Anything relative is imagined by God; it’s an illusion.
- The illusion of relativity is necessary for God to experience itself. Without the illusion it can only know itself. God can know about temperature but can experience hot only in comparison to an experience of cold.
- God chooses to experience all that it is. To do that it must experience all that it isn’t.
- God experiences everything through us, within the illusion of relativity.
- To be something that God is, like happy, we must be what God is not, sad.
- We need not alternate between sadness and happiness to be happy. We can remember sadness instead, or empathize with others’ sadness.
- You are always a body-mind-soul being, but the body and mind are like tools. The soul is the real you.
- Your soul knows everything about anything.
- At birth you voluntarily forgot much of what you know, so that you will unknowingly choose to experience that which God is not, like afraid, so that in turn you can experience that which God is, like fearless.
- There is nothing to learn. There are only things to be remembered.
- When we create or learn something, we actually only remember it. It was always there, for God is everything always, including every thought and creation. This explains “even before you ask, it shall be answered” and “seek, and you shall find.”
- Every path is a spiritual path.
- What you feel is your choice.
- You cannot fail to experience fullest glory, the sum of all feelings.
- Time and space are relative. Anything relative is imagined by God; it’s an illusion.
- The illusion of relativity is necessary for God to experience itself. Without the illusion it can only know itself. God can know about temperature but can experience hot only in comparison to an experience of cold.
- God chooses to experience all that it is. To do that it must experience all that it isn’t.
- God experiences everything through us, within the illusion of relativity.
- To be something that God is, like happy, we must be what God is not, sad.
- We need not alternate between sadness and happiness to be happy. We can remember sadness instead, or empathize with others’ sadness.
- You are always a body-mind-soul being, but the body and mind are like tools. The soul is the real you.
- Your soul knows everything about anything.
- At birth you voluntarily forgot much of what you know, so that you will unknowingly choose to experience that which God is not, like afraid, so that in turn you can experience that which God is, like fearless.
- There is nothing to learn. There are only things to be remembered.
- When we create or learn something, we actually only remember it. It was always there, for God is everything always, including every thought and creation. This explains “even before you ask, it shall be answered” and “seek, and you shall find.”
Hevene:
Let me try this another way; to experience something is to feel or sense it directly. Being human we cannot help but experience what it is to be human. However, since we cannot experience what it is to be something other than human we cannot differentiate the experience of 'humanness' from our other perceptions yet it is intrinsic. Heck... are we even on topic anymore?
http://www.ierm.ed.ac.uk/ierm/teaching/slides.pdf
~Raithere
Let me try this another way; to experience something is to feel or sense it directly. Being human we cannot help but experience what it is to be human. However, since we cannot experience what it is to be something other than human we cannot differentiate the experience of 'humanness' from our other perceptions yet it is intrinsic. Heck... are we even on topic anymore?
From what do you conclude that I deny my feelings and thoughts?
Yes, the biochemistry of our cells is very similar but their function is not. Can you give a hypothesis as to how consciousness might reside and function in non neural cells?
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'full photosynthesis potential' most trees do not take 300 years to reach maturity (an oak takes 20, for instance) but the issue is total photosynthetic biomass not the production of individual plants. For the last 20 years or more the U.S. has reversed the previous trend towards deforestation to the point where North America operates at a net deficit of CO2 despite the fact that we produce more CO2 through industry than any other continent. The main problem areas are in South America, Africa, and Asia primarily due to slash and burn farming practices but even these areas are starting to improve.
http://www.ierm.ed.ac.uk/ierm/teaching/slides.pdf
Again, it is primarily a local issue. There is also the issue of what we consider 'clean'. Due to technology our 1st world standards of what is considered 'clean' have risen dramatically. Yet this has happened only in the last century or so. Humans have subsisted on water that is dramatically below these standards for millions of years yet somehow the notion has arisen that this is unacceptable or impossible. I'm for improving water quality and the overall health of all people but the alarmists are exaggerating. The primary problem areas are where the local populations overwhelm the natural processes but do not or cannot implement the technology to compensate.
Not necessarily, but for now it's true enough.
If spirituality is life then why not just say life
~Raithere
YES. It is intrinsic, that is you'll know it conceptually, and the fact you cannot differentiate the expereince, you can only know it conceptually, but not experientially. You see my point?
What seems to me that you do not believe and trust your feelings and thoughts.
When you instructed my limbs to move but they seemed to be fixed, you often experience this when you are about to have an accident.
A tree that is 20 years old is different to a tree that is much older. They are bigger, with more surface area to absorbe CO2 and produce O2. Of course that differ from tree to tree. But the link clearly suggested cutting trees down is not going to reduce CO2 levels. That's what I'm saying, why keep on doing the things that is not going to benifit our society.
The question is why do we overwhelm the natural processes in the first place? And you said it's a local issue. Even though it is not happening to me, but since we are all one, what is happening to others in happening to me. I don't see it as a local issue, it is a world issue, and we should all work together to solve the problem.
If you are thinking about moving to another planet, it's not gonna happen for a long time and so for the time being, our survival do depend on The Earth's survival.
Firstly, most people don't understand that. And it's just something we all love to do, to classify things into either this or that. Why not think outside the square? I think both/and.
I still disagree. What are we experiencing if we are not experiencing being human?
But I do. I just have never experienced receiving someone's thoughts directly and there is no evidence that indicates that anyone else can either. I'm willing to leave it as a possibility but if you are going state that it is true you'll need something to back it up with.
I haven't had that many accidents but I cannot recall ever not being able to move when I've tried. Still the mechanism is readily apparent, muscles do not move of their own volition, they are stimulated into movement by nerves. We could look at the reverse situation, reflexes, where the limbs move without conscious volition but that mechanism is understood as well as a kind of neurological feedback loop.
Because cutting down trees does benefit our society. The important part, and that which we are quite diligent about in the U.S., is making sure we plant new trees to replace the old. Again, it is total photosynthetic biomass that is important.
That is a good question and one that we need to pay more attention to. Luckily it seems to be a problem that reveals itself. When a society has trashed its environment to the point where the individuals feel the effects personally they begin to behave more sanely. We're the only creatures that do so. What seems important to me is helping other societies recognize the problem before it becomes too bad and remembering the lesson after the problem is corrected. But typically the environmentalist attitude is alarmist and often highly politically and ideologically oriented. This I have a problem with.
It's a human issue. And I do agree that we should try to help each other but exaggerating the problem and causing knee-jerk reactions is not the best solution.
I'll keep hoping because sooner or later the Earth is going to experience a catastrophe that has nothing to do with peoples actions and it won't survive. Heck, we could get hit by a gamma ray burst tomorrow morning, and that's all she wrote.
I think that we have different ideas of what life is but I agree with questioning categorizations and thinking outside the box. The more ideas we explore, the more ways we can find to look at things the better our chances of finding really good solutions.
~Raithere
I don't necessarily restrict it to mathematics; logic and empirical results are primary for me. Math is really only a language (however rigorously logical) and is subject to the same fallacies as any other logical system. But I do request proof, although it may not be irrefutable, before I will give myself to a belief. It's not that I reject hope or possibility nor that I refuse to sometimes act upon them but I categorize such things as unproven and cannot claim true belief in them. I find it unreasonable to do so.
Personally, I find death to be extraneous and I am not particularly concerned with it. I am concerned with living happily and well and helping others to do the same.
Not directly but one's model of how the Universe functions is intrinsic to those questions which do. Many, if not most, religions are founded upon unproven models, which I find troubling. Presumptions are taken as axiomatic and while this is not always a problem most often it is, particularly when the individual is considering any alternative model. This is where a large part of the hostility and animosity between viewpoints derives.
The point you're omitting is why he believed this pursuit was worthy. I have no problem with beliefs that run against those that are mainstream or are generally accepted. I believe that investigating these possibilities is important whether or not they have any substantial evidence initially or not. The problem I have is with those who rigorously assert their belief is 'true' regardless of the lack of evidence.
That is the question, isn't it? But I don't find the answer(s) within any religion satisfactory. Those that come closest in their entirety, IMO, are Buddhism, Taoism, and some gnostic / mystic expressions of other religions but I have a feeling this has more to do with their philosophical nature as apposed to the more assertive positions of most others. The objections that I maintain towards these few are primarily academic as they do seem to be the most practically successful religious paradigms and it's not that one cannot interpret other religions in a manner that is similarly successful but that they seem to get in the way more than help.
I question whether it is 'perfectly engineered' but this is indeed an area that I find the principle of unity I was commenting on earlier. However, this only provides a frame of reference; the structure is apparently relativistic and fundamentally probabilistic rather than deterministic. Operating within such a structure I find the absolute positions unwarranted.
If I may draw a parallel; QED is the most accurate scientific model ever and (pardon if I paraphrase Feynman) but anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics does not understand quantum mechanics. I don't find anything that even begins to approach this level of accuracy within religion yet religions constantly assert absolute and unconditional 'truths'. I find this absurd. At their best they are expressions of the human condition and philosophy... and most often they are not at their best.
I agree that the circle points back to us, but I disagree with your conclusion. I find the spirit / mind / body triangle of opposition to be an illusion; it's just another set of dualities. But you hit upon what I find to be a key principle; the circle points back to us. Why?
Because no matter how hard we try, no matter what we think or how objective we try to be we cannot remove ourselves and the conditions of our existence from the equation. Some attempt to interpret this as meaning reality exists within or because of consciousness but that approach reduces into just another absurdity. Instead consciousness is our condition within the whole. Is it a condition of the whole? I don't know; I see various problems and possibilities to this that I have not been able to resolve. Perhaps it is and this is what we mean by god... or perhaps not. The question, while interesting, is all but irrelevant to me.
I'm rambling now... I'll leave it here.
~Raithere