AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jun 05, 2021 2:33 pm
OK, well, you must at least admit that is dualism of the post-Cartesian sort i.e. a
division in essence between God and not God.
Yes exactly, god doesn’t see the need to avoid any dualism at all levels, and knows that he is not the same as his creation. Dualism between mind and matter is wrong, dualism between god and creation is true.
Some of the early church fathers called Isaiah “the fifth gospel” because is resonated with the gospels so well, even though it was written 700 years before then.
We have become so familiar with that way of thinking that we assume it is how everyone thought prior to the 15th century.
I don’t think we do? Pantheism has been around for ages, in eastern religions like Brahmanism, and in greek religions like Orphism, which fed into the early gnostic beliefs. It was the Judeo and then Christian scriptures (such as Isaiah) that had god as the ground of being, but also explicitly other from creation.
It is only that assumption which allows us to treat "ideas of the Divine intellect" as non-living entities and something more akin to cold intellectual abstractions. Or to treat the Word of God, i.e. God's Breath and Speech, as actually identical to our intellectual concept of "word" rather than its living essence.
I don’t really follow you here. God’s breath is what gives life, and his word is very much alive and the same as him. I don’t know how far you can get from “cold intellectual abstractions”! Maybe you are referring instead to “ideas in the divine intellect”? If so this is more about the intelligibility of the way the universe was created, and is. At one level they shape the universe. At another we can make sense of things as “universals” because they have a foundation in the the foundational ideas that shape the context of our existence. It’s these original ungraspable templates that we create shadow versions of to understand things**. This is why I say your view seems flat, because in it the shadows we create (as our thoughts and ideas) to resonate with the natural intelligibility of the universe are like the whole story to you, rather than a discovery or uncovering. The best scientists, mathematicians etc usually describe their new understandings as discoveries rather than creations for good reason. It’s our search to make the shadows that are our ideas closer to the true ideas through which all came to be.
** Of course there are many universals/forms/ideas that we have created ourselves that are truly inventions and not discoveries. However in this we imitate the way the aspects of nature were created. Most of these are trivial in metaphysical terms, say a television or a car, or a mathematical construct that has no correspondence to nature, although some can of course be harmful, such as communism or racism.
Ashvin wrote:
Again, it is only the Cartesian dualist divide which allows you to claim "representation" is nothing more than forming a mental image of the "external world" in your own personal bubble of consciousness. You have expunged participatory consciousness from the picture completely.
Of course I haven’t. When my mind interacts with a mental form through the senses, that interaction produces my experience of a physical form, of physical properties. This “external world” is purely representation, there is nothing more to it than the mental essences. But there is still my essence which has a form, and an essence of that which I am observing. Both of these have a degree of consistency for all observers, of continuity, but the participation is via a representation on the screen of perception. This is purely an interaction between two forms, a relationship, between “a personal bubble of consciousness” and a ‘mental process in M@L’.
When you say “Cartesian”, that usually refers to the way Descartes separated the ‘objective facts’ from subjective experience, where the latter gets written of as somehow an unhelpful and unreliable aspect of reality that can be ignored. I don’t see how you can claim that I am doing that. I am saying that the whole universe is ultimately ‘like mind’, and physical properties are purely surface representations when forms within ‘mind’ interact.
You could call it dual aspect monism I guess, or hylomorphism, but it was the default before Descartes and not after, so calling my ideas cartesian makes no sense at all.
And how you are managing to equate my position, which upholds participatory consciousness, with "physicalism" more than your own is beyond my comprehension. Just think about it for a moment - if there was "mental stuff" existing prior to the existence of all living beings then you must posit a dualism between non-life and life and some sort of mechanism which transforms non-life into life, just as the physicalists do.
Not at all. If the universe is like mind, then there is a way in which it is alive. Plato calls it the world soul, though I’m not sure if calling it a soul makes sense. It seems more like a very habitual organism, given a very particular telos at creation. In fact I do speculatively see the planets and stars as like kind of alters within M@L. Its certainly very fractal-like. Yes biological life has something unique compared to inanimate forms, and humans of course something even more unique. But god is the essence of life, so everything he creates has some degree of life.
Perhaps you posit that God is that mechanism as an 'external entity' who takes non-life and imbues it with life, but then that undermines your entire position because God is certainly a living being under any Western conception.
I think life is something far more fundamental, and god is far more than
a being. In the western tradition he is usually referred to as Being, the root of all being, rather than
a being. This is why the Trinity is so important, because from our perspective he can be immanent in a personal way, rather than as unknowable transcendent Being.
Part of the problem here may be that you are speaking of only your limited ego i.e. your narrow representation of your small "s" self. But because your OP was about essential relations and we are on a forum about those metaphysical essential relations, I am speaking of what actually exists rather than what my limited ego-self is able to represent at any given moment.
I certainly wouldn’t claim to be fully awakened in the eastern sense, and my brief glimpses of waking states were surely not full. However from when I did meditate more often, I think I experienced enough of the root of conscious experience to have some idea of the realms beyond my personal ego. This seems to be the realm you talk of as what “actually exists”, but I’m not sure I recognise what you see there any more than I do when you speak of god. From my minor experience of that ‘transcendence’, I wouldn’t actually use the word ‘empty’ as the buddhists tend to, but I think it’s a better description than thoughts or “essential relations”. In some ways it’s without any relations at all, it just is, beyond description. Of course some philosophers take the essence of the experience to try and describe reality from it, but to conceptualise “what actually is” based purely on the experience of transcendence seems like a strange thing to me. There is nothing you could ever write on paper to convey that experience to another person. So while it’s a life changing experience, one that changes you and how you see things, the key is understanding correctly where it fits in relation to your other epistemic sources of knowledge, the different ways of knowing.
Ashvin wrote:
Once again, you are imagining human beings as the physicalists do - fixed entities who, at one time, do not have the Spirit and, at another time, get the Spirit into their personal bubble of consciousness.
We are spirit! But our spirit is not innately entwined with gods spirit, other than in sustaining our being. That only happens through relationship, through turning your heart and mind to him;
John wrote: If you love Me, you will keepe My commandments. 16And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocatef to be with you forever— 17the Spirit of truth. The world cannot receive Him, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. But you do know Him, for He abides with you and will be in you.
[…]
23Jesus replied, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word. My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. 24Whoever does not love Me does not keep My words. The word that you hear is not My own, but it is from the Father who sent Me.
All through scripture there are sheep and goats. To be a sheep is to enter a personal relationship, through prayer, through proper humility before him etc.
Matthew wrote: 21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me’
By what thought-action do they receive the Spirit in your view, I have no idea.
Through the eucharist, through prayer, through loving god, through trying to treat others as you would like to be treated, through silent contemplation, through being thankful, through ‘feeding the hungry’, ‘clothing the naked’, ‘comforting the stranger’ etc. It’s nothing new, the same as it’s always been.
But, regardless, humans are not static entities. We are living microcosmic processes unfolding in the overall process of the Macrocosm. Everything you referenced and quoted above is exactly in line with my view of the Universe consisting of only living archetypal beings and avoids the irresolvable hard dualism of non-life and life. I once again have no idea how you are referencing Kabbalah and Neoplatonism as support for your modern dualistic view of God and man. Maybe you can point out what specific parts of that article you are relying on.
I see the Kabbalah as like the tree in the garden of paradise that Pageau described in the video. And with neoplatonism there are obviously different versions, with the ‘pagan’ versions sometimes being more like pantheism. Nonetheless “the one” is usually seen as at least in some sense completely ‘other’ than the emanations, and certainly is in the christian flavours of it.
And, the quote from "pseudo"-Dionysius you provided is referencing esoteric Christian tradition and the Unification of God and man through the "perfecting mysteries"! That is the tradition you are explicitly rejecting in your standard exoteric theistic conception.
Of course it’s not. You don’t seem to have ever gone to a catholic mass? The “Divine Eucharist” / “the perfecting mysteries” are a core part of every sunday for over a billion catholics, and have been since the early church, just as they would have been for Dionysius.
Another problem here is that you are downgrading "thinking" and "thought" like all moderns do. Pretty much all of the essays I have been writing lately have been to restore that high and noble understanding of Thinking as the ancient Greeks and Scholastics had. That is why you can claim "knowing" does not involve relationship when, in fact, truly knowing, especially in the Biblical sense, is the highest form of relationship one can imagine.
I’m just saying that our thoughts are not the same as god’s thoughts. The scholastics were driven to try to “know the mind of god”. It was this yearning to
uncover this higher, deeper truth that drove them. This is very different from ‘co-creating’ the thoughts of god.
