What constitutes “observation” (/“measurement”)

[AshvinP]

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.

They are the exact same thing if you hold to God who truly creates and sustains the world. You are just pushing back the dualism onto transcendent God because it seems consistent with idealism and not as obviously wrong. But the fact is that it is not consistent with idealism and just as problematic as plain vanilla mind-matter dualism.

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. We can make sense of things as “universals” because they have a foundation in the ideas that shape our reality. It’s like the 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.

Well I guess you have not read any of my essays re: the nature of Thinking and Ideation. I am not going to rewrite them here but just point you in their direction. I hold the same noble view of Thinking as all of the medieval theologians quoted before. If you think they had "flat" view of Thinking then so be it. But you say "create" thoughts and ideas which is downgrading thinking to purely personal activity.

My question for you, though, was what are the "ideas in Divine intellect" in their essence if they are NOT living beings. Are they non-living blobs of ideal content or what? If it is a way of representing the structure of the Mind of God, then how can they be anything other than alive?

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.

Again, Cleric and I have been writing about this very topic pretty much non stop for last few months. Read his Beyond Flat MAL essay again. You will see how what you wrote above is great example of Flat MAL view. You are partioning off your bubble of consciousness from rest of world and imagining the extent of your participation to be taking some external and complete mental stuff and forming a representation of it within your personal bubble. That is no different from materialist view except you are substituting external physical stuff for external mental stuff so it seems more consistent with idealism. I am not saying you are doing this intentionally but rather via influence of "bad habits" that we are unaware of operating in the background of our thinking.

I may respond to rest of your post later, but really there is no point until you recognize the issues I am pointing about. Until then, you must painfully "work around" the implications of your implicit Cartesian dualism by proposing all sorts of schemes by which the Universe is kind of living and kind of not, God's spirit is kind of intertwined with ours but kind of not, so on and so forth. There is no point deviating into philosophical labels and selective quotes until we sort out the above first. I will take blame for starting that.

[Simon Adams]

They are the exact same thing if you hold to God who truly creates and sustains the world. You are just pushing back the dualism onto transcendent God because it seems consistent with idealism and not as obviously wrong. But the fact is that it is not consistent with idealism and just as problematic as plain vanilla mind-matter dualism.

No I disagree. Mind-matter dualism makes no sense at all. You can't have two physical forms taking the same space and time, so mind-matter dualists have this "ghost in the machine" kind of idea where something immaterial 'floats' alongside, or is generated from, the body. Either way, one of the obvious problems with this is that there is then no way for the mind to have a causal influence on the body. There are of course other nonsense problems with this dualism, but none of them apply in the dualism between god and the universe. Everything ultimately comes from god, is sustained by him, and will return to him. None of the frameworks we have for understanding how this all fits together is (or can be) anything more than a vague analogy. So you can have the biblical tree in the centre of the garden of paradise, which the Kabbalah tries to describe, where the rivers flow down from god, starting off simple and pure, and flowing through the divine ideas to shape the many things in the garden. Or you can have the Greek neoplatonic version which has the different levels of emanation flowing from the One. I'll readily admit there are versions of neoplatonism where the distinction between the One and the emanations is not a substantial difference, but certainly all the christian ones do. That's not just scriptural (although it is in part), but also god is uncreated, unchanging.

So I'm happy if you want to say I'm not an idealist, but I am an idealist in that all these folds or layers that flow from god are more like mind than anything else (although ultimately it's probably more accurate to say spirit). We can discover the horizontal of this structure through introspection, but we can never experience the whole of the vertical, and so building your whole world view from that which we can experience is missing a huge part of the picture. As Genesis explains;

2 Then the Lord God said, “Now these human beings have become like one of us and have knowledge of what is good and what is bad. They must not be allowed to take fruit from the tree that gives life, eat it, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God sent them out of the Garden of Eden and made them cultivate the soil from which they had been formed. 24 Then at the east side of the garden he put living creatures and a flaming sword which turned in all directions. This was to keep anyone from coming near the tree that gives life.

Well I guess you have not read any of my essays re: the nature of Thinking and Ideation. I am not going to rewrite them here but just point you in their direction. I hold the same noble view of Thinking as all of the medieval theologians quoted before. If you think they had "flat" view of Thinking then so be it. But you say "create" thoughts and ideas which is downgrading thinking to purely personal activity.

My question for you, though, was what are the "ideas in Divine intellect" in their essence if they are NOT living beings. Are they non-living blobs of ideal content or what? If it is a way of representing the structure of the Mind of God, then how can they be anything other than alive?

The only being that the divine ideas are associated with is god, and he is not really a being. They have no extension in time and space, so they are not 'blobs' of any sort. There is only so much we can know about them. We can infer their existence, and read what god has revealed about them, and as we partially mirror them in our intelligible understanding of the world we can guess something of them. But we are simply not able to grasp them as they are, or experience them directly, let alone describe them as they are.

Again, Cleric and I have been writing about this very topic pretty much non stop for last few months. Read his Beyond Flat MAL essay again. You will see how what you wrote above is great example of Flat MAL view. You are partioning off your bubble of consciousness from rest of world and imagining the extent of your participation to be taking some external and complete mental stuff and forming a representation of it within your personal bubble. That is no different from materialist view except you are substituting external physical stuff for external mental stuff so it seems more consistent with idealism. I am not saying you are doing this intentionally but rather via influence of "bad habits" that we are unaware of operating in the background of our thinking.

I just have a different type of idealism, just as yours is different from the eastern type. Strangely you say that yours is the same as the scholastics, but I find yours more like the the German idealists. I actually find the eastern type of idealism more understandable, as I 'get' the shared screen of perception, the essential unity on the horizontal (even though they would say it's not just the horizontal, but their method of inquiry is limited to the horizontal).

I may respond to rest of your post later, but really there is no point until you recognize the issues I am pointing about. Until then, you must painfully "work around" the implications of your implicit Cartesian dualism by proposing all sorts of schemes by which the Universe is kind of living and kind of not, God's spirit is kind of intertwined with ours but kind of not, so on and so forth. There is no point deviating into philosophical labels and selective quotes until we sort out the above first. I will take blame for starting that.

Yes these threads get longer and longer and take up a lot of time, and I don't think we will ever see eye to eye . As you say we have very different foundational contexts. I think you are trying to add the vertical into the horizontal, which lays vertical content along the horizontal. I certainly don't know everything and have only been looking into philosophy for the last year or two, so I'll admit it's very primitive in many ways. However I've been trying to understand things all my life, and your version of god does not seem to me like the deep connection I sometimes find in the mental silence of Eucharistic Adoration. To me that trumps all conceptualisation, by a million miles and more.

[SanteriSatama]

Mind-matter dualism makes no sense at all. You can't have two physical forms taking the same space and time, so mind-matter dualists have this "ghost in the machine" kind of idea where something immaterial 'floats' alongside, or is generated from, the body. Either way, one of the obvious problems with this is that there is then no way for the mind to have a causal influence on the body. There are of course other nonsense problems with this dualism, but none of them apply in the dualism between god and the universe.

Sorry for the nitpicking, but "two physical forms taking the same space and time" sounds like a very narrow (and thus nonsense) definition of a physical form. I get that you are referring to scholastic res extensa definition or something similar, but we've also moved on from those days and to include contemporary physics better in the discussion, we need to accept e.g. also fields as physical forms.

Inspiration (and or possession) could be defined as intersection of physical forms. Both in the spiritual meaning and wave-particle meaning of quantum physics... to return to the OP question.

This is a rather good talk on the topic, rhyming well with the Norman Wildberger video I posted on another thread:



What we can gather and generalize from these, is that 'measurement' is mereology (ie part-whole relating) of continua.

[AshvinP]

They are the exact same thing if you hold to God who truly creates and sustains the world. You are just pushing back the dualism onto transcendent God because it seems consistent with idealism and not as obviously wrong. But the fact is that it is not consistent with idealism and just as problematic as plain vanilla mind-matter dualism.

No I disagree. Mind-matter dualism makes no sense at all. You can't have two physical forms taking the same space and time, so mind-matter dualists have this "ghost in the machine" kind of idea where something immaterial 'floats' alongside, or is generated from, the body. Either way, one of the obvious problems with this is that there is then no way for the mind to have a causal influence on the body. There are of course other nonsense problems with this dualism, but none of them apply in the dualism between god and the universe. Everything ultimately comes from god, is sustained by him, and will return to him. None of the frameworks we have for understanding how this all fits together is (or can be) anything more than a vague analogy. So you can have the biblical tree in the centre of the garden of paradise, which the Kabbalah tries to describe, where the rivers flow down from god, starting off simple and pure, and flowing through the divine ideas to shape the many things in the garden. Or you can have the Greek neoplatonic version which has the different levels of emanation flowing from the One. I'll readily admit there are versions of neoplatonism where the distinction between the One and the emanations is not a substantial difference, but certainly all the christian ones do. That's not just scriptural (although it is in part), but also god is uncreated, unchanging.

So I'm happy if you want to say I'm not an idealist, but I am an idealist in that all these folds or layers that flow from god are more like mind than anything else (although ultimately it's probably more accurate to say spirit). We can discover the horizontal of this structure through introspection, but we can never experience the whole of the vertical, and so building your whole world view from that which we can experience is missing a huge part of the picture. As Genesis explains;

2 Then the Lord God said, “Now these human beings have become like one of us and have knowledge of what is good and what is bad. They must not be allowed to take fruit from the tree that gives life, eat it, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God sent them out of the Garden of Eden and made them cultivate the soil from which they had been formed. 24 Then at the east side of the garden he put living creatures and a flaming sword which turned in all directions. This was to keep anyone from coming near the tree that gives life.

With the God-man dualism, you are making God the "Mind" and man the "matter". For the materialist-dualist, our inner mental life is private, inaccessible by others, purely "subjective" and therefore incapable of being empirically studied or given any detailed resolution. Even though sciences of the mind in the 20th century have really contradicted all of that, most people still think that way and leave the realm of mind fuzzy so that there is no further responsibility for investigating it and coming to deep Self-knowledge. For the materialist-dualist, the mind which allows us to experience and say anything about the world of "matter" is left completely in the blind spot.

That is what you are also doing with the purely transcendent God - He is the sustaining life force of everything in the Universe yet somehow remains entirely inaccessible to our cognition and therefore any detailed resolution. What allows us to experience and say anything about ourselves in our Earthly life is left fuzzy and in the blind spot of our experience. As for Kabballah and Neoplatonism and Genesis, all of this confusion comes from failure to accept the metamorphic progression of Spirit. You are criticizing my perspective on God for being too "intellectual" because it suggests God can be known, but ironically it is only your projecting back of modern intellectual concepts onto those early spiritual philosophies which makes it seem like they conform to your God-man dualism.

I mentioned Plotinus briefly in the Incarnating the Christ essay - if we take the metamorphic progression seriously, then we see that the One in the spiritual realm also permeates the physical realm to the point where the latter barely even exists for him. The world and the heavens are Unified and they are all Spirit, through and through.

Well I guess you have not read any of my essays re: the nature of Thinking and Ideation. I am not going to rewrite them here but just point you in their direction. I hold the same noble view of Thinking as all of the medieval theologians quoted before. If you think they had "flat" view of Thinking then so be it. But you say "create" thoughts and ideas which is downgrading thinking to purely personal activity.

My question for you, though, was what are the "ideas in Divine intellect" in their essence if they are NOT living beings. Are they non-living blobs of ideal content or what? If it is a way of representing the structure of the Mind of God, then how can they be anything other than alive?

The only being that the divine ideas are associated with is god, and he is not really a being. They have no extension in time and space, so they are not 'blobs' of any sort. There is only so much we can know about them. We can infer their existence, and read what god has revealed about them, and as we partially mirror them in our intelligible understanding of the world we can guess something of them. But we are simply not able to grasp them as they are, or experience them directly, let alone describe them as they are.

As I said above, you are making God the "mind" of the mind-matter dualism so all of these things are left fuzzy indefinitely into the future. God may not be "a being", but he certainly has a living personality, right? So what I am suggesting is that the "divine ideas" also have living personalities and we can come to perceive and know those personalities as we do with fellow human personalities.

Again, Cleric and I have been writing about this very topic pretty much non stop for last few months. Read his Beyond Flat MAL essay again. You will see how what you wrote above is great example of Flat MAL view. You are partioning off your bubble of consciousness from rest of world and imagining the extent of your participation to be taking some external and complete mental stuff and forming a representation of it within your personal bubble. That is no different from materialist view except you are substituting external physical stuff for external mental stuff so it seems more consistent with idealism. I am not saying you are doing this intentionally but rather via influence of "bad habits" that we are unaware of operating in the background of our thinking.

I just have a different type of idealism, just as yours is different from the eastern type. Strangely you say that yours is the same as the scholastics, but I find yours more like the the German idealists. I actually find the eastern type of idealism more understandable, as I 'get' the shared screen of perception, the essential unity on the horizontal (even though they would say it's not just the horizontal, but their method of inquiry is limited to the horizontal).

I may respond to rest of your post later, but really there is no point until you recognize the issues I am pointing about. Until then, you must painfully "work around" the implications of your implicit Cartesian dualism by proposing all sorts of schemes by which the Universe is kind of living and kind of not, God's spirit is kind of intertwined with ours but kind of not, so on and so forth. There is no point deviating into philosophical labels and selective quotes until we sort out the above first. I will take blame for starting that.

Yes these threads get longer and longer and take up a lot of time, and I don't think we will ever see eye to eye . As you say we have very different foundational contexts. I think you are trying to add the vertical into the horizontal, which lays vertical content along the horizontal. I certainly don't know everything and have only been looking into philosophy for the last year or two, so I'll admit it's very primitive in many ways. However I've been trying to understand things all my life, and your version of god does not seem to me like the deep connection I sometimes find in the mental silence of Eucharistic Adoration. To me that trumps all conceptualisation, by a million miles and more.

Those bolded statements are exactly right - you are remaining content with the horizontal which is essentially the domain of the abstract intellect or the Eastern mystical (note to Eugene if reading - I am not claiming that is true of all Eastern traditions). It keeps the resolution on the Divine as low as possible by either stringing together some abstract intellectual concepts (Western modern idealism) or breaking them up and dispersing them all into 'space' (mystical). That is what the German idealists also did (abstract intellect), including even Hegel who recognized the metamorphic Spirit very well, and I am suggesting that is not at all sufficient for 21st century man - we must also embrace the vertical knowledge of higher cognition. That is the domain of imaginative and intuitive cognition which provides much higher 'right brain' resolution on the spiritual realm. I understand that these are not easy or natural things for us to grasp after the modern era, and I myself have much trouble remaining consistent when thinking through these things with mere intellect. At the same time, I can definitely say it becomes more natural to perceive-think vertically about these concepts the more I practice by dwelling within that perspective.

[SanteriSatama]

With the God-man dualism, you are making God the "Mind" and man the "matter". For the materialist-dualist, our inner mental life is private, inaccessible by others, purely "subjective" and therefore incapable of being empirically studied or given any detailed resolution. Even though sciences of the mind in the 20th century have really contradicted all of that, most people still think that way and leave the realm of mind fuzzy so that there is no further responsibility for investigating it and coming to deep Self-knowledge. For the materialist-dualist, the mind which allows us to experience and say anything about the world of "matter" is left completely in the blind spot.

Not in any way trying to answer on behalf of your opponent, but there's also deeply ethical foundation for refusing omnipotence and omniscience, in order to accept our role and meaning in particpatory creation and evolution. Our Promethean aspect as also fallen and rebelling angels against formal and detailed resolutions-projections of prisons of eternal harmony. Naturally, this is also an essence of Jungian Shadow-integration, with full implications for how we measure and cast in the Matrix of Plato's Caves and in the Mouth of the Cave, and in the out as well.

And of course, deep down all dualisms are aspect dualisms, not ontological absolute separations.

[AshvinP]

With the God-man dualism, you are making God the "Mind" and man the "matter". For the materialist-dualist, our inner mental life is private, inaccessible by others, purely "subjective" and therefore incapable of being empirically studied or given any detailed resolution. Even though sciences of the mind in the 20th century have really contradicted all of that, most people still think that way and leave the realm of mind fuzzy so that there is no further responsibility for investigating it and coming to deep Self-knowledge. For the materialist-dualist, the mind which allows us to experience and say anything about the world of "matter" is left completely in the blind spot.

Not in any way trying to answer on behalf of your opponent, but there's also deeply ethical foundation for refusing omnipotence and omniscience, in order to accept our role and meaning in particpatory creation and evolution. Our Promethean aspect as also fallen and rebelling angels against formal and detailed resolutions-projections of prisons of eternal harmony. Naturally, this is also an essence of Jungian Shadow-integration, with full implications for how we measure and cast in the Matrix of Plato's Caves and in the Mouth of the Cave, and in the out as well.

And of course, deep down all dualisms are aspect dualisms, not ontological absolute separations.

That is an ethical foundation for rejecting absolute limitations of knowledge. The person who accepts such limitations feels they have already reached the most resolution on the spiritual essence they will have in this lifetime, either via intellectual framework of modern theology or via experience of 'mystical union' with the Absolute. That person is content to remain with the knowledge they have and therefore feels no need to continue evolving towards more detailed resolution. The essence of Jungian psychology is Self-knowledge i.e. "individuation". It is only through that Self-knowledge do we bring about Union of the opposites. Jung himself leaned towards some sort of hard limitation on knowledge via Kantian influence, but going beyond such limitation is IMO implicit in his psychology-philosophy. It is a straw man to say this vertical cognition view seeks "omnipotence and omniscience" because it is only and always seeking more integral resolution and knowledge relative to the moment before. It refuses to project its own responsibility for Self-determination onto external God or the Cosmos at large.

I agree dualisms should only be treated as aspect distinctions and are not actually "absolute separations", but that is not how Simon or most others are treating them. They are treating them as absolute separations in essence, or at best some sort of confusing mix of absolute separation and non-separation which ends up being absolute separation for all intents and purposes.

[SanteriSatama]

That is an ethical foundation for rejecting absolute limitations of knowledge.

Sure. All the awfully sweet and sweetly awful is in the zone between.

I get the metaphor of the Cross of vertical and horizontal, but even that can get boring in the long run, with also so much else to explore. Like continued fraction of one, with internal resolution increasing by each division and generation of a new row. But the phi of golden ratio is present in both forms, as the width and height of <> is phi : 1, if the joined triangles are equilateral. Phi and the mysteries of division-partition are in many ways more interesting than the paradigm of sign of addition +. Which divides both the vertical and horizontal line by their other. But look at Φ !!! It has a circle!

[Simon Adams]

Sorry for the nitpicking, but "two physical forms taking the same space and time" sounds like a very narrow (and thus nonsense) definition of a physical form. I get that you are referring to scholastic res extensa definition or something similar, but we've also moved on from those days and to include contemporary physics better in the discussion, we need to accept e.g. also fields as physical forms.

Yes fair point, we should “steel man” the dualist position and use the modern versions (although you still see similar versions of these). I must admit that I hadn’t really thought about a field as a physical form. Isn’t the physical form what the field does, rather than what it is? Also you only have the three fields (or maybe one if we get a TOE), so I don’t really see how it could ever be seen as a “physical form”? Or do you mean EM fields?

Inspiration (and or possession) could be defined as intersection of physical forms. Both in the spiritual meaning and wave-particle meaning of quantum physics... to return to the OP question.

I’m not quite sure what the “physical” in “physical forms” means the way you are using it. Nonetheless, in a very round about way this is the point I was making. The dualism between god and the universe could be seen in the same way as the substance / mind dualism. In that case we see that it’s really all mind, and the physical properties are just an artefact of mind doing it’s stuff. However if we do that, then there is only god and nothing else, for all being is ultimately being from god. So yes you could say only the eternal really EXISTS, but at that level there is only god, no universe and no us, so I don’t think it’s helpful to collapse that duality.

This is a rather good talk on the topic, rhyming well with the Norman Wildberger video I posted on another thread:

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What we can gather and generalize from these, is that 'measurement' is mereology (ie part-whole relating) of continua.

Yes it’s an interesting that measurement and entanglement are the same thing. Apart from anything, this does show that human consciousness is not required for “measurement” (or going back to the OP, to produce “physical” properties), as we entangle photons all the time.

[Simon Adams]

With the God-man dualism, you are making God the "Mind" and man the "matter".

Not at all. The universe is mind but the universe is not god, and god is not the universe.

For the materialist-dualist, our inner mental life is private, inaccessible by others, purely "subjective" and therefore incapable of being empirically studied or given any detailed resolution. Even though sciences of the mind in the 20th century have really contradicted all of that, most people still think that way and leave the realm of mind fuzzy so that there is no further responsibility for investigating it and coming to deep Self-knowledge. For the materialist-dualist, the mind which allows us to experience and say anything about the world of "matter" is left completely in the blind spot.

That is what you are also doing with the purely transcendent God - He is the sustaining life force of everything in the Universe yet somehow remains entirely inaccessible to our cognition and therefore any detailed resolution. What allows us to experience and say anything about ourselves in our Earthly life is left fuzzy and in the blind spot of our experience. As for Kabballah and Neoplatonism and Genesis, all of this confusion comes from failure to accept the metamorphic progression of Spirit. You are criticizing my perspective on God for being too "intellectual" because it suggests God can be known, but ironically it is only your projecting back of modern intellectual concepts onto those early spiritual philosophies which makes it seem like they conform to your God-man dualism.

We’re going around in circles. It’s just not true that early christianity was pantheistic (apart from some small gnostic sects). God ‘sees’ everything, sustains everything, and can be immanent in the universe, but the universe is not god, and god is not the universe. We’ve recently had Pentecost where god became immanent to all the disciples. The eastern understanding of this would be that the disciples all had a transcendent experience at the same time. That is very explicitly not the christian understanding of it, and it’s not the way Jesus described it.

I mentioned Plotinus briefly in the Incarnating the Christ essay - if we take the metamorphic progression seriously, then we see that the One in the spiritual realm also permeates the physical realm to the point where the latter barely even exists for him. The world and the heavens are Unified and they are all Spirit, through and through.

Yes but even Plotinus has the One as entirely immutable, and so the way in which a changeless One can - from our perspective - be active and present is one where the distinction between essence and act gets easily lost. The church fathers were heavily influenced by neoplatonism, such as Clement and Augustine, but they were very careful to avoid the pantheistic tendencies that crept into some versions. Weirdly (and from a very shallow reading) I think Plotinus was more careful than Dionysius about this, even though he wasn’t christian.

The trouble is that when you’re reading these things from your perspective, then whenever you see a description of deification, you seem to assume that is describing the natural state. For most of these people writing, that is their ultimate aim, the pinnacle, so they write about it a lot, but it’s describing a spiritual movement on the vertical, beyond what you may call the ‘collective conscious’, what John of the Cross calls “the secret ladder”, or the Eastern Church the “ Ladder of Divine Ascent”, or Scala. It’s a unique experience, the destination of a journey, not a transcending of the separation between the individual and the ‘collective’.

As I said above, you are making God the "mind" of the mind-matter dualism so all of these things are left fuzzy indefinitely into the future. God may not be "a being", but he certainly has a living personality, right? So what I am suggesting is that the "divine ideas" also have living personalities and we can come to perceive and know those personalities as we do with fellow human personalities.

I don’t see how they are comparable. Maybe god has has revealed something to you, but I don’t think these are directly accessible in ways that would make sense. We can construct images of them through reason and their effects, but these will always be shadows. In terms of knowing god it’s always best to think of him as one. The closer you get to him, the better you need to be at the discernment of spirits, for the elements of deception and distraction become greater. This is why the spiritual path has practices, it’s a real journey and the amount of knowledge you really need is small. Understanding is a good thing, but doing is vital.

[AshvinP]

With the God-man dualism, you are making God the "Mind" and man the "matter".

Not at all. The universe is mind but the universe is not god, and god is not the universe.

For the materialist-dualist, our inner mental life is private, inaccessible by others, purely "subjective" and therefore incapable of being empirically studied or given any detailed resolution. Even though sciences of the mind in the 20th century have really contradicted all of that, most people still think that way and leave the realm of mind fuzzy so that there is no further responsibility for investigating it and coming to deep Self-knowledge. For the materialist-dualist, the mind which allows us to experience and say anything about the world of "matter" is left completely in the blind spot.

That is what you are also doing with the purely transcendent God - He is the sustaining life force of everything in the Universe yet somehow remains entirely inaccessible to our cognition and therefore any detailed resolution. What allows us to experience and say anything about ourselves in our Earthly life is left fuzzy and in the blind spot of our experience. As for Kabballah and Neoplatonism and Genesis, all of this confusion comes from failure to accept the metamorphic progression of Spirit. You are criticizing my perspective on God for being too "intellectual" because it suggests God can be known, but ironically it is only your projecting back of modern intellectual concepts onto those early spiritual philosophies which makes it seem like they conform to your God-man dualism.

We’re going around in circles. It’s just not true that early christianity was pantheistic (apart from some small gnostic sects). God ‘sees’ everything, sustains everything, and can be immanent in the universe, but the universe is not god, and god is not the universe. We’ve recently had Pentecost where god became immanent to all the disciples. The eastern understanding of this would be that the disciples all had a transcendent experience at the same time. That is very explicitly not the christian understanding of it, and it’s not the way Jesus described it.

I mentioned Plotinus briefly in the Incarnating the Christ essay - if we take the metamorphic progression seriously, then we see that the One in the spiritual realm also permeates the physical realm to the point where the latter barely even exists for him. The world and the heavens are Unified and they are all Spirit, through and through.

Yes but even Plotinus has the One as entirely immutable, and so the way in which a changeless One can - from our perspective - be active and present is one where the distinction between essence and act gets easily lost. The church fathers were heavily influenced by neoplatonism, such as Clement and Augustine, but they were very careful to avoid the pantheistic tendencies that crept into some versions. Weirdly (and from a very shallow reading) I think Plotinus was more careful than Dionysius about this, even though he wasn’t christian.

The trouble is that when you’re reading these things from your perspective, then whenever you see a description of deification, you seem to assume that is describing the natural state. For most of these people writing, that is their ultimate aim, the pinnacle, so they write about it a lot, but it’s describing a spiritual movement on the vertical, beyond what you may call the ‘collective conscious’, what John of the Cross calls “the secret ladder”, or the Eastern Church the “ Ladder of Divine Ascent”, or Scala. It’s a unique experience, the destination of a journey, not a transcending of the separation between the individual and the ‘collective’.

I think I see part of the confusion here when you keep referencing "pantheism". You seem to think I am speaking of a situation where God and the Universe and man are naturally at the same 'level' of spiritual development. Under pantheism of that sort, God and the Universe are unified in the sense that when we speak about one we are practically speaking about the other. That is not at all what I hold to. That is why I try to avoid all such labels but if I were forced to choose one, it would be "panentheism". What I hold to is what is bolded above - a continual process of ascension towards the Divine. This process is from the bottom-up and from the top-down, so to speak; attracting and being-attracted; saving and being-saved.

I also think you are ignoring the highly esoteric origin and nature of these symbols you are referencing in the early Church and medieval period. But leaving all of that aside for now, what is your response to my original question - how is your view of God practically any different from the dualist view of "mind", where it is forever beyond rigorous and detailed study? How are you not 'pushing back' the "completely subjective" and dualist interaction problem (how does mind interact with matter) onto your God-concept, so that the latter becomes the Subjective perspective which cannot be studied and has no specified means by which the phenomenal world we experience comes into existence and is sustained throughout our experience (other than simply calling it a "miracle")?

As I said above, you are making God the "mind" of the mind-matter dualism so all of these things are left fuzzy indefinitely into the future. God may not be "a being", but he certainly has a living personality, right? So what I am suggesting is that the "divine ideas" also have living personalities and we can come to perceive and know those personalities as we do with fellow human personalities.

I don’t see how they are comparable. Maybe god has has revealed something to you, but I don’t think these are directly accessible in ways that would make sense. We can construct images of them through reason and their effects, but these will always be shadows. In terms of knowing god it’s always best to think of him as one. The closer you get to him, the better you need to be at the discernment of spirits, for the elements of deception and distraction become greater. This is why the spiritual path has practices, it’s a real journey and the amount of knowledge you really need is small. Understanding is a good thing, but doing is vital.

I agree but you are explicitly making him two by separating Him as Creator from our-Selves as created in our essence. We do not need special revelation to see the basics of how these things work (or rather what we call "revelation" is what the Spirit is constantly doing through our Thinking, if we do not artificially divide ourselves from that Spirit). In your own experience of Being, there is clearly more than one single perspective at work. We see that scientifically via RB and LB distinction, but you can also hold a finger in front of your eyes and close each one to see the shift in perspective. That is what we all are in essence - manifold perspectives of the One - and we mostly experience the other perspectives as living personalities, so why assume they are anything different? (mostly because we normally no longer experience the mineral and plant kingdoms in the way, but, as I mentioned in the TMT Part 3 essay, we can always trace back the underlying principles of those kingdoms to living agencies).