Getting to know people?

[Dawid Dahl]

Hello, everyone! Thanks Bruce for inviting me.

 

I'm Dawid, from Sweden, with a passion for abstruse truth, pensive art, well-rounded morality, daring transhumanism, and integral cognition.

 

It would be awesome to get to know a few of you people here. (James, e, Bruce and Irmeli I am fortunate enough to know a little already, even back from the ol' Zaads days.) So I thought that perhaps the easiest way of making that happen would be to start with a premeditatedly terse - perhaps annoyingly so? - question! I'd really appreciate any answers, be they elaborate or concise, 0-tier or 4th-tier. So here goes:

 

Does God exist?

 

Kindly,

Dawid

 

:)

[Balder]

Hi, Dawid, welcome!

 

And I like your question!  Stir things up around here.

 

For now, with it being Christmas eve and all, I am inclined to answer your question with a "Yes.*"

 

 

 

* with lots of fine print underneath!  :-)

[Dawid Dahl]

Heh, that's a very good answer, Bruce! I'm with you completely.

 

Though, maybe someone will add a word or two to this "Yes" which will set off that fine print avalanche, eh? :P

 

Merry Christmas and yule-times!

[Philip Wootton]

Isn't asking the question the proof of the existence.  If you can ask it, you, at  least, have God in your mind.

 

My  first post,  Happy Holidays, Phil

[Dawid Dahl]

Heya, Philip. Seems I'm not the only new-comer here! :)

 

You don't draw a distinction between "having something in your mind" and "something existing"? For example, I can have Smurfs in my mind, but Smurfs don't really exist. Or what do you think? 

[Philip Wootton]

Dawid Dahl said:

Heya, Philip. Seems I'm not the only new-comer here! :)

 

You don't draw a distinction between "having something in your mind" and "something existing"? For example, I can have Smurfs in my mind, but Smurfs don't really exist. Or what do you think? 

[Philip Wootton]

Hi Dawid,

It seems like to me having something in your mind (the idea of God) is having it exist in your mind, so God exists.  In fact, a God experienced in the mind is more real than a God out of mind experience.  If a God has never been in a mind, it is outside of experience, and it has never existed as far as we are concerned.  Thus the real God is just the experienced God. If the God in our minds is the same as some Universal God, then our mind God, adds to and creates God.  If we are nature become conscious of itself and nature is God, we are God creating itself as it creates us. There is nothing external to nature, conscousness, experience, or ideas that we can know about. God is nothing but all our images of God, we make God, and so made, God is the most active, common,  and universal existence in the universe and influences us through something like the Akashic Field of natural memory.  If God didn't exist, God exists now, due to our ideas making God in a field.  Everything that exists has agency, so our created God has agency.  God exists, knows and is all that we are and know, and acts through us and in us.  Even if God is not in an Akashic field memory, God is in our community memory and has existence beyond our individual ideas.

       Hope this makes some sense,   Phil

 

[Dawid Dahl]

"If we are nature become conscious of itself and nature is God, we are God creating itself as it creates us."

 

Are you are saying that God does exist — as nature? Aka pantheism?

 

If you are saying that, then surely God must exist prior to a human being's thoughts about God? Or?

[Philip Wootton]

Yes, God is the source, the one, and all the ways we can know about the unfolding.  God is the complexificaton and organization of matter, the evolution of organisms, the light of consciousness creativity, and the glory of sacred spirit.  This is certain, all else is problematical.

 

Then again, maybe god is Hermes the trickster, what do I know.

 

take care, Phil

[marilyn milam]

I agree with most everything Philip said.  What I am not clear about is if he maintains that any knowledge of God we may have is limited to some type of bodily activity such as thoughts in our brains or some bodily sensations caused by these thoughts.  I cannot go along with that if that is the case.

 

Marilyn 

[Balder]

Here's something I posted on another recent thread that I would offer here as resonant with some of my own thoughts on "God" (a brief description of Father Raimon Panikkar's position on atheism and "God" and then a quote from Panikkar himself):

"[Panikkar] regards atheism, at least as it has found expression among some thinkers, as an evolutionary step beyond monotheism, and has said he'd like to put a moratorium on the word, 'God.' For Panikkar, the divine is not some entity or being 'out there,' or even a reified entity 'within,' but rather the depth dimension or openness of things, the inexhaustibility and infinity of being that can be intuited in and through and 'as' all particular things.”

Panikkar: God is sublimated, as I have said, but the sublimation must now be condensed somewhere, and it is the human interior that will supply the walls on which God will crystalize in humanity – not, however, as a distinct being, come to take refuge in our interior, but as something that is ours by right, and that had only been momentarily removed. But all metaphor is dangerous here, especially if it be interpreted in a substantialistic key. Perhaps God did die; but in that case what is happening now is that God is risen, albeit not as “God” but as humankind. But something similar should be said about humankind. Human beings are not God, not the center either. There is no center.

[Dawid Dahl]

"For Panikkar, the divine is not some entity or being 'out there,' or even a reified entity 'within,' but rather the depth dimension or openness of things, the inexhaustibility and infinity of being that can be intuited in and through and 'as' all particular things."

 

Very nice.

 

Do you guys think that God can be described in terms of key aspects? Philosophies does this. To the Tibetans for example Rigpa has three characteristics or aspects: purity, formations, and compassion. To me, there are two aspects of God that, no matter as I've tried, cannot make empty; they seem to be kinda what God is about, as we talk about God in dualistic language. (When dualistic language stops though, the two categories stops to be meaningful.) I've had this belief now for a couple of years, and it hasn't changed very much, so it has kind of stood the test of time.

 

1) suchness.

2) regularity.

 

Suchness is the fact that -- no matter if we are in the "gross world" or the "dream world" -- even though all things are empty, the human concept of "utter nothingness", a kind of blank void of endless darkness, does never apply. While I can say nothing positive about God, i.e. "God is X", I can also not say that God doesn't exist, that there's "utter nothing". Both of those alternatives would be dualistic. Suchness is therefore best described by koans or non-conceptual expressions such as running around naked, or a sharp-sounding clap of the hands.

 

However, if we must (or want to) describe it in positive language, I think Panikkar made a good attempt in the quote. Or the word "suchness" is also, I think, a good positive description.

 

Regularity is the simple observation that the world is not chaotic. (This is the more controversial assertive aspect of God, as I've found Green cognition often reluctant to accept it.) If the world was truly chaotic, everything that could possibly happen would happen all the time, and nothing would work. One could not function in a world like that.

 

People will say: "Hey, in quantum psychics there is true chaos!" And to this I reply that the irregularity of quantum phenomena can only be possible in a non-chaotic kosmos; in a chaotic kosmos, quantum phenomena could simultanously be regular and irregular, and this is not what we observe. Quantum phenomena simply can not be reduced into our neat conceptual/digital boxes, and that is a fact. (A qubit can be both 1 and 0 at the same time, and that is a fact.) If this was a chaotic kosmos, that would only be a fact perhaps half of the time.

 

So regularity is the observation that in the dualistic world of enacted phenomena, things can definitely be one way, and not infinite ways all at once, which would render all dualistic conversation meaningless. That said, when dualistic conceptuality stops, all phenomena infinitely reflect and inter-penetrate eachother in a boundless way, and here things can exist in infinite ways, all at once, defying our conceptually imputed space-time limitations. This profound paradox is explored by Hua Yen Buddhism.

 

What do you think about these aspects of God? What are your own "essential aspects"?

 

[Christophe]

Hello Dawid,

 

I remember you from the Archipelago discussion board. You are that swedish Buddhist Wunderkind, aren't you. How are things going?

 

God? I heard he died some time ago.

 

Furthermore, I like the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) notion that there is no such thing as an allmighty, allperfect, allknowing Superior Being. Rather, this emtpy space is inhabited by the Master Signifier, who, despite its name, nonetheless has a hidden weak spot. Of course somebody inhabiting the Space of the Master will go a great length to avoid his weakness to be seen. The inevitablity of the holy metabolim usually guarantees that the denied (repressed) truth shows itself: as a rule of thumb, it will be first noticed by its smell, which is said to be rather disturbing to the unsuspecting nose.

 

Eh, I just noticed that Panikkar' quote above says something similar to what I expressed here. Nice.