Bernardo's latest essay

[Simon Adams]

BK's conclusion is correct here, but the major difference between us is how he presumes to reach it. I know nothing of Rovelli's metaphysics so I will leave him out of it. BK adheres to Schopenhauer's philosophy of universal Will, which presumes that in the individual's "direct" experience of will, absent all ideal content, there is experience of Reality-in-itself. There is a major error here, which is the same error of naïve realism (such as we find in physicalism) - a perception of experience (will) can be considered real without its ideal content. The naïve physicalist sees grass, flowers, trees, etc. outside himself and considers them all essentially real without thinking through how they relate in their ideal content. The philosopher of Will sees an act of will within himself and considers it essentially real without any ideal content relating it to the world at large.

The philosopher of Will is even more inconsistent than the physicalist because he arbitrarily gives priority to inner perception over outer perception.
This difference is very important because it leads directly to BK's concept of the physical world as "a set of dials". If the universal principle which links us to the world's Unity is the mere experience of will without ideal content, then one must claim all other perceptions in the world are pretty much useless towards knowledge of the underlying relations. They help us survive in a virtual reality game, but that's the entire extent of it. At the lowest level of resolution, we could say that concept is sufficiently accurate to challenge the naïve physicalist, but at any higher resolution, such as discussions which take place within idealism, it is simply incorrect.

I will say, though, that in discussion with Mark Vernon, BK speaks of the songs of birds and says it gives him a strong intuition there is more to the phenomenal world than simply forms which evolved for physical survival and only such survival. If he follows that intuition, then he cannot help but remove Thinking from his blind spot to recognize that ideational activity-content is what truly bears the world's aesthetic Unity.

I think I have a clearer idea from this about where we differ. You assume that (1) the deeper meaning of things is purely in the “ideal content”, and you assume (2) this ideal content is like physical properties in that it only has substance in relation. From all you’ve written I think I understand why you make these assumptions, but I just have different conclusions.

For (1), I very much don’t deny the deeper meaning. However I don’t see the deepest meaning coming from our relations. I see the meaning folding out from a centre, where we are part of the folding out, not the unfolder that originates it. We do generate our own meaning, and we also do our own refolding where we try to discover the deeper meaning (maybe what you call Thinking), but this is in effect a mirror of the original process. It’s the original unfolding where all fundamental meaning comes from. So whilst I agree that we co-create meaning, at the most fundamental level this is just us recreating from discovered meaning. I sympathise with your ‘good intentions’ of giving Bernardo (and even more so the dead thinking of physicalists) reason to find deliberate meaning in the beauty of birdsong, but to me you’re sourcing that meaning purely in perception and thinking, when in fact it has a more hidden original source.

With (2), I do agree with Bernardo that there is a reality which he calls absolute behind the representation (the word sub-stance is very appropriate). I wouldn’t use the word “absolute”, but I agree with it in terms of not requiring human perception for it’s existence.

You will of course disagree with both of these, and you have your reasons, I just disagree with them. To me the reason for your assumptions is an assumption that you, Bernardo, Jung, the German idealists etc etc etc all make, which is that mind at large is the same as god. It was an assumption made at some point between Aquinas and Spinoza, and then just became assumed fact.

[DandelionSoul]

I'm not at all certain there's a meaningful difference between an ontology in which there is just no ground underlying the relationships that give being to beings and an ontology in which there is a ground underlying those relationships, but that ground has no qualities, properties, traits, and cannot be described or defined in any way except by reference to the relationships it engenders. "Ground" in this case simply gestures at a pure, contentless presence, which in its contentlessness seems to me indistinguishable from absence, a being that is indistinguishable from nothing. It's a capacity, which is to say, an emptiness, but one not demarcated with limits (as in the emptiness inside a cup). If the ground, by virtue of being pure presence or pure being or pure mind, is an unlimited emptiness, distinguishable from nothing by nothing, then arguing over whether there is or isn't a ground seems to me to be trying to make conceptual thought do what by its nature it just can't -- with a nod to Alan Watts, it seems a bit like trying to bite one's own teeth.

[Cleric K]

For (1), I very much don’t deny the deeper meaning. However I don’t see the deepest meaning coming from our relations. I see the meaning folding out from a centre, where we are part of the folding out, not the unfolder that originates it. We do generate our own meaning, and we also do our own refolding where we try to discover the deeper meaning (maybe what you call Thinking), but this is in effect a mirror of the original process. It’s the original unfolding where all fundamental meaning comes from. So whilst I agree that we co-create meaning, at the most fundamental level this is just us recreating from discovered meaning. I sympathise with your ‘good intentions’ of giving Bernardo (and even more so the dead thinking of physicalists) reason to find deliberate meaning in the beauty of birdsong, but to me you’re sourcing that meaning purely in perception and thinking, when in fact it has a more hidden original source.

The question is how do we know that we're "just us recreating from discovered meaning". This is the Kantian divide at its purest. We use intellectual thinking to postulate something that is completely inaccessible to Thinking. So how do we know that this beyond thing exists? We can't know - it is in the very definition that we can't possibly know. We have postulated a world behind the curtain of our personal consciousness, which can never be known (and to be known means that we should be able to live cognitively in the world behind the curtain). So that world, whatever we call it - God, Will, physical world, etc. - is entirely an object of belief.

The above is one of the clearest things we can logically think of. It's a transparent truth. This have been discussed so many times already, including at length in Ashvin's essays. So why can't we take this obvious truth to its ultimate consequences? Why do we feel obliged to cut ourselves from what lives behind the curtain? Obviously we don't do that because of certainty resulting from cognition of truth - if we had that cognitive certainty this would mean that we have cognitive experience of what lies behind the curtain and that would defeat our postulate. At the ground of this are feelings which are commented over with thoughts (which if considered more closely are quite inconsistent). We have deep feelings that there's more to reality than what meets the abstract intellectual eye. This is justified feeling. But when we go on and say that cognitive spiritual activity (Thinking) is forever torn from that reality, we're simply postulating our impotence, that we believe alleviates us from any further responsibilities.

If God is the benevolent and merciful Being that we envision Him to be, why would He put his creations in situation where they can only find their way to Him through belief? We must be clear that religious and mystical feelings are very powerful but ultimately comprehended by Thinking. We can't know that we're having religious feelings without Thinking, let alone know that they refer to some God. Where one feels Christ, another may feel Shiva or Allah, or Yahve, etc. Isn't it glaringly obvious that these are the desperate signs of the times we're in? When it's only about religious feelings of what lies behind the curtain, there could never be any agreement. It's all a matter of which deity snatches at a soul first. When the devil snatches a soul he says "Bow to no other gods than me. If you turn to other gods you're faith is weak and you'll be damned". Of course people don't know it's the devil. Everyone feels the most sublime deity behind the curtain and sees it as an act of betrayal deserving damnation if the authority of the being living behind the curtain is questioned. So why would God do this to us? Why would he put us in a situation where we can never know? God knows human nature perfectly well. If he wanted to become One with His people why would he basically leave that to random choice? Because this is what it is. If we are forever disconnected from what lies behind the curtain, we practically make completely random choice when we choose our deity - be it the Christian God, the void, the psychedelic wall of imagery, the Will or simply lifeless matter. We can support our choice with thinking but by definition we can never know if our choice is ultimately right. So there are different gates with differently colored curtains and the poor humans are allowed to choose a gate and bow before the doorstep until the time for departure comes. Only then the curtain is lifted and the human sees if they have placed their bet on the winning deity.

And all this just because we insist that our spiritual activity is completely separated from the Divine reality behind the curtain and can only know its inner bubble representations.

[Jim Cross]

I'm not at all certain there's a meaningful difference between an ontology in which there is just no ground underlying the relationships that give being to beings and an ontology in which there is a ground underlying those relationships, but that ground has no qualities, properties, traits, and cannot be described or defined in any way except by reference to the relationships it engenders. "Ground" in this case simply gestures at a pure, contentless presence, which in its contentlessness seems to me indistinguishable from absence, a being that is indistinguishable from nothing. It's a capacity, which is to say, an emptiness, but one not demarcated with limits (as in the emptiness inside a cup). If the ground, by virtue of being pure presence or pure being or pure mind, is an unlimited emptiness, distinguishable from nothing by nothing, then arguing over whether there is or isn't a ground seems to me to be trying to make conceptual thought do what by its nature it just can't -- with a nod to Alan Watts, it seems a bit like trying to bite one's own teeth.

If I could upvote this comment, I would. I think this is why many philosophies have given up on trying to describe it. They recognize that the dichotomies we make are themselves relative.

[Lou Gold]

Yes I agree with Bernardo on this. The challenge of course is that when you see matter as fundamental, then what is left when you realise that it’s pure interaction.

I’m curious what Ashvin thinks of this;

In my view, if the physical world has no standalone reality and is entirely relational, then there necessarily is a deeper, by definition non-physical but absolute (in the sense of not being relative) layer of reality that grounds the physical world, and of which the physical world is but a measurement image akin to a set of dials.

BK's conclusion is correct here, but the major difference between us is how he presumes to reach it. I know nothing of Rovelli's metaphysics so I will leave him out of it. BK adheres to Schopenhauer's philosophy of universal Will, which presumes that in the individual's "direct" experience of will, absent all ideal content, there is experience of Reality-in-itself. There is a major error here, which is the same error of naïve realism (such as we find in physicalism) - a perception of experience (will) can be considered real without its ideal content. The naïve physicalist sees grass, flowers, trees, etc. outside himself and considers them all essentially real without thinking through how they relate in their ideal content. The philosopher of Will sees an act of will within himself and considers it essentially real without any ideal content relating it to the world at large.

The philosopher of Will is even more inconsistent than the physicalist because he arbitrarily gives priority to inner perception over outer perception.
This difference is very important because it leads directly to BK's concept of the physical world as "a set of dials". If the universal principle which links us to the world's Unity is the mere experience of will without ideal content, then one must claim all other perceptions in the world are pretty much useless towards knowledge of the underlying relations. They help us survive in a virtual reality game, but that's the entire extent of it. At the lowest level of resolution, we could say that concept is sufficiently accurate to challenge the naïve physicalist, but at any higher resolution, such as discussions which take place within idealism, it is simply incorrect.

I will say, though, that in discussion with Mark Vernon, BK speaks of the songs of birds and says it gives him a strong intuition there is more to the phenomenal world than simply forms which evolved for physical survival and only such survival. If he follows that intuition, then he cannot help but remove Thinking from his blind spot to recognize that ideational activity-content is what truly bears the world's aesthetic Unity.

The extraordinary documentary "The Queen of Trees" offers a marvelous contemplation on the world's aesthetic unity.

[Lou Gold]

I'm not at all certain there's a meaningful difference between an ontology in which there is just no ground underlying the relationships that give being to beings and an ontology in which there is a ground underlying those relationships, but that ground has no qualities, properties, traits, and cannot be described or defined in any way except by reference to the relationships it engenders. "Ground" in this case simply gestures at a pure, contentless presence, which in its contentlessness seems to me indistinguishable from absence, a being that is indistinguishable from nothing. It's a capacity, which is to say, an emptiness, but one not demarcated with limits (as in the emptiness inside a cup). If the ground, by virtue of being pure presence or pure being or pure mind, is an unlimited emptiness, distinguishable from nothing by nothing, then arguing over whether there is or isn't a ground seems to me to be trying to make conceptual thought do what by its nature it just can't -- with a nod to Alan Watts, it seems a bit like trying to bite one's own teeth.

... contentlessness seems to me indistinguishable from absence ....

This is surely one way to write the story. Another way might be to say that the unmanifest offers maximum potential. Perhaps the story is the difference making the difference.

[Simon Adams]

The question is how do we know that we're "just us recreating from discovered meaning". This is the Kantian divide at its purest. We use intellectual thinking to postulate something that is completely inaccessible to Thinking. So how do we know that this beyond thing exists? We can't know - it is in the very definition that we can't possibly know. We have postulated a world behind the curtain of our personal consciousness, which can never be known (and to be known means that we should be able to live cognitively in the world behind the curtain). So that world, whatever we call it - God, Will, physical world, etc. - is entirely an object of belief.

I would say I have many reasons for thinking this. There are some things we learn where we just build a picture based on the knowledge we read, hear, experience etc. In this we use imagination and intuition which are both powerful, and are of course, in a sense, resonating with the wider collective consciousness. However sometimes it's more like a glimpse of something whole and complete and perfect. It's beyond us (which I mean in a collective sense), but I am convinced that there is a fundamental difference between insights that suddenly click together and have a clear but partial sense, and the more profound feeling of glimpsing something complete dimly and partially. In the first it's a sense of something changing and changeable, in the second its something complete and changeless, even though it can never be 'grasped'. Of course at some point this is supported by my faith, but it's certainly not without reason.

The above is one of the clearest things we can logically think of. It's a transparent truth. This have been discussed so many times already, including at length in Ashvin's essays. So why can't we take this obvious truth to its ultimate consequences? Why do we feel obliged to cut ourselves from what lives behind the curtain?

I don't want to cut myself off from anything. The universe is an amazing place, it's full of wonder, and yes from one perspective it's made of the same substance as us. It's imbued with meaning that a physicalist view is blind to. But its what lives in the separation of the one into poles. The one is still whole and absolute, and all meaning and existence comes from 'it', but 'it' is not in any way relative, other than in relation to that which came from it. In fact all things only have their own existence in relation to 'it'.

So I'm not cutting myself off from anything, I'm just saying that there is a thin veil between us and the 'cosmic consciousness', or M@L. It can be overcome - if you can perceive perception directly, then you can transcend this veil (which is the Buddhist etc path). However god you can't just chose to perceive. He is only known through his fingerprints in creation and through personal relationship. Other than that, he is entirely hidden, deliberately.

It's not reasonable to say "people have talked about god, and now we have found out that the universe is made out of mind, so therefore that mind is god". That's a HUGE assumption, and doesn't fit the evidence. Bernardo sticks very much to the evidence in fleshing out his essential ontology that he discusses openly, and therefore he says M@L must be instinctive. It does the same things with regularity, over and over again. If you're claiming this as a being, then it's more like a simple organism than anything else. Then of course he runs into the fine tuning problem, because it all seems very carefully set from the start, and then tries to find explanations for that such as changing laws, repeated attempts at creating a universe, where we are just in the final one that worked etc. These are all arguably feasible, but from my perspective it's trying to find ways out of the original mistaken assumption that SO MANY philosophers have made and keep making.

Also, if you want to talk about god, then at some point that has to be based on some kind of revelation. So why not take that revelation to be more than the primitive musings of people that didn't really understand things?

John 1:18
No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.

Colossians 1:15
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation

1 Timothy 6:16
who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.

Exodus 33:20
But He said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!”

John 5:37
And the Father who sent Me, He has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time nor seen His form.

Romans 1:20
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

If God is the benevolent and merciful Being that we envision Him to be, why would He put his creations in situation where they can only find their way to Him through belief?

Because when you create free beings, some just chose to love evil. Only by having the time and space to make mistakes, to be on the receiving end of the consequences of evil, do we really have the chance to learn and decide. As we are we would never learn the lessons you get from feeling helpless, lost, confused, weak etc. As he says, he is refining us like silver in the furnace. Fortunately this furnace has a lot of beauty and joy, along with the purging fire.

We must be clear that religious and mystical feelings are very powerful but ultimately comprehended by Thinking. We can't know that we're having religious feelings without Thinking, let alone know that they refer to some God. Where one feels Christ, another may feel Shiva or Allah, or Yahve, etc. Isn't it glaringly obvious that these are the desperate signs of the times we're in? When it's only about religious feelings of what lies behind the curtain, there could never be any agreement. It's all a matter of which deity snatches at a soul first. When the devil snatches a soul he says "Bow to no other gods than me. If you turn to other gods you're faith is weak and you'll be damned". Of course people don't know it's the devil. Everyone feels the most sublime deity behind the curtain and sees it as an act of betrayal deserving damnation if the authority of the being living behind the curtain is questioned. So why would God do this to us? Why would he put us in a situation where we can never know? God knows human nature perfectly well. If he wanted to become One with His people why would he basically leave that to random choice? Because this is what it is. If we are forever disconnected from what lies behind the curtain, we practically make completely random choice when we choose our deity - be it the Christian God, the void, the psychedelic wall of imagery, the Will or simply lifeless matter. We can support our choice with thinking but by definition we can never know if our choice is ultimately right. So there are different gates with differently colored curtains and the poor humans are allowed to choose a gate and bow before the doorstep until the time for departure comes. Only then the curtain is lifted and the human sees if they have placed their bet on the winning deity.

And all this just because we insist that our spiritual activity is completely separated from the Divine reality behind the curtain and can only know its inner bubble representations.

I can only speak of what I know, which includes that we will see it is all perfect at the end of our lives, when we have passed through fully. I do know that there is more to it than we know in detail, for example;

John 10

I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.

[AshvinP]

BK's conclusion is correct here, but the major difference between us is how he presumes to reach it. I know nothing of Rovelli's metaphysics so I will leave him out of it. BK adheres to Schopenhauer's philosophy of universal Will, which presumes that in the individual's "direct" experience of will, absent all ideal content, there is experience of Reality-in-itself. There is a major error here, which is the same error of naïve realism (such as we find in physicalism) - a perception of experience (will) can be considered real without its ideal content. The naïve physicalist sees grass, flowers, trees, etc. outside himself and considers them all essentially real without thinking through how they relate in their ideal content. The philosopher of Will sees an act of will within himself and considers it essentially real without any ideal content relating it to the world at large.

The philosopher of Will is even more inconsistent than the physicalist because he arbitrarily gives priority to inner perception over outer perception.
This difference is very important because it leads directly to BK's concept of the physical world as "a set of dials". If the universal principle which links us to the world's Unity is the mere experience of will without ideal content, then one must claim all other perceptions in the world are pretty much useless towards knowledge of the underlying relations. They help us survive in a virtual reality game, but that's the entire extent of it. At the lowest level of resolution, we could say that concept is sufficiently accurate to challenge the naïve physicalist, but at any higher resolution, such as discussions which take place within idealism, it is simply incorrect.

I will say, though, that in discussion with Mark Vernon, BK speaks of the songs of birds and says it gives him a strong intuition there is more to the phenomenal world than simply forms which evolved for physical survival and only such survival. If he follows that intuition, then he cannot help but remove Thinking from his blind spot to recognize that ideational activity-content is what truly bears the world's aesthetic Unity.

I think I have a clearer idea from this about where we differ. You assume that (1) the deeper meaning of things is purely in the “ideal content”, and you assume (2) this ideal content is like physical properties in that it only has substance in relation. From all you’ve written I think I understand why you make these assumptions, but I just have different conclusions.

For (1), I very much don’t deny the deeper meaning. However I don’t see the deepest meaning coming from our relations. I see the meaning folding out from a centre, where we are part of the folding out, not the unfolder that originates it. We do generate our own meaning, and we also do our own refolding where we try to discover the deeper meaning (maybe what you call Thinking), but this is in effect a mirror of the original process. It’s the original unfolding where all fundamental meaning comes from. So whilst I agree that we co-create meaning, at the most fundamental level this is just us recreating from discovered meaning. I sympathise with your ‘good intentions’ of giving Bernardo (and even more so the dead thinking of physicalists) reason to find deliberate meaning in the beauty of birdsong, but to me you’re sourcing that meaning purely in perception and thinking, when in fact it has a more hidden original source.

With (2), I do agree with Bernardo that there is a reality which he calls absolute behind the representation (the word sub-stance is very appropriate). I wouldn’t use the word “absolute”, but I agree with it in terms of not requiring human perception for it’s existence.

You will of course disagree with both of these, and you have your reasons, I just disagree with them. To me the reason for your assumptions is an assumption that you, Bernardo, Jung, the German idealists etc etc etc all make, which is that mind at large is the same as god. It was an assumption made at some point between Aquinas and Spinoza, and then just became assumed fact.

In addition to what Cleric responded, I will add - all meaning, not only the "deeper" meaning, is in the ideal content (which all perspectives share). How could it be any other way?? When something appears meaningful to you, whether it's a feeling within you or an image from without, it is because you are Thinking about it. That is such a transparent and undeniable given of our experience that we really should not still be arguing about it... it is so transparent that the reasons for questioning it can only reside within one's personal prejudices. The only way that is not true is if we exclude any sort of intuitive knowing from Thinking, and there is no good reason to do so. The naïve person can do such things, but we are on a metaphysical forum and get to think these things through carefully in every comment.

Also, the presupposition that people prior to "some point between Aquinas and Spinoza" held to a more dualistic view of God than we do now is the exact opposite of the actual metamorphic progression we can easily discern from the history of art, philosophy, science, etc. And your view is admittedly dualistic in an absolute sense. Finally, in your response to Cleric you use the word "known" re: God - why do 'we' find it so difficult to admit that whatever is known is known through Thinking? Again, this denial can only lie within our own personal prejudices because otherwise that given fact is beyond obvious. This below is also cleared up by taking metamorphic progression of Spirit seriously (which is not as obvious as things mentioned above but there is plenty of easy-to-find evidence for if one is actually looking):

Also, if you want to talk about god, then at some point that has to be based on some kind of revelation. So why not take that revelation to be more than the primitive musings of people that didn't really understand things?

Those "primitive musings" are due to people experiencing ideal forms from without. Their thought-forms appeared external like ours appear internal today. That is not to say the appearances more accurately reflect what is occurring today - in fact it is the opposite - because if thought-forms appeared to us today from without we would immediately recognize that living personalities were responsible for them. Therefore, there is continuity between "revelation" for ancient people and "true understanding" for modern people, whereas in standard theology there is no continuity whatsoever. This quote from Jung may help:

Levy-Bruhl has coined the expression participation mystique for these curious relationships. It seems to me that the word "mystical" is not well chosen. Primitive man does not see anything mystical in these matters, but considers them perfectly natural. It is only we who find anything strange about them, and the reason is that we seem to know nothing about such psychic phenomenon. In reality, however, they occur to us too, but we give them more civilized forms of expression. In daily life it happens all the time that we presume that the psychic processes of other people are the same as ours. We suppose that what is pleasing or desirable to us is the same to others, and that what seems bad to us must also seem bad to them.
...
Equality before the law still represents a great human achievement; it has not yet been superseded. And we still attribute to "the other fellow" all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves. That is why we have to criticize and attack him. What happens in such a case, however, is that an inferior "soul" emigrates from one person to another. The world is still full of bêtes noirés and of scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves.
...
The simple truth is that primitive man is somewhat more given to projection than we because of the undifferentiated state of his mind and his consequent inability to criticize himself. Everything to him is perfectly objective, and his language reflects this in a radical way... we often represent a person as a goose, a cow, a hen, a snake, an ox, or an ass. As uncomplimentary epithets these images are familiar to us all. But when primitive man attributes a bush-soul to a person, the poison of the moral verdict is absent. Archaic man is too naturalistic for that; he is too much impressed by things as they are to pass judgment readily...

The theme of bush-soul, which seems so strange when we meet with it in primitive societies, has become with us, like so much else, a mere figure of speech. If we take our metaphors in a concrete way we return to a primitive point of view... since all unconscious psychic life is concrete and objective for archaic man, he supposed that a person describable as a leopard has the soul of a leopard. If the concretizing goes further, he assumes that such a soul lives in the bush in the form of a real leopard.

These identifications, brought about by the projection of psychic happenings, create a world in which man is contained not only physically, but psychically as well. To a certain extent he coalesces with it...

In the primitive world everything has psychic qualities. Everything is endowed with the elements of man's psyche - or let us say, of the human psyche, of the collective unconscious, for there is as yet no individual psychic life. Let us not forget, in this connection, that what the Christian sacrament of baptism purports to do is of the greatest importance for the psychic development of mankind. Baptism endows the human being with a unique soul... I mean the idea of baptism lifts a man out of his archaic identification with the world and changes him into a being who stands above it. The fact that mankind has risen to the level of this idea is baptism in the deepest sense, for it means the birth of spiritual man who transcends nature.
- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

[Simon Adams]

In addition to what Cleric responded, I will add - all meaning, not only the "deeper" meaning, is in the ideal content (which all perspectives share). How could it be any other way?? When something appears meaningful to you, whether it's a feeling within you or an image from without, it is because you are Thinking about it. That is such a transparent and undeniable given of our experience that we really should not still be arguing about it... it is so transparent that the reasons for questioning it can only reside within one's personal prejudices.

You choose to limit the totality of reality effectively to what can be studied by psychology, then you argue that there can't be anything more than that which is accessible to psychology. We can indeed create meaning, but the deepest meaning is only ever discovered or revealed.

[/quote]Also, the presupposition that people prior to "some point between Aquinas and Spinoza" held to a more dualistic view of God than we do now is the exact opposite of the actual metamorphic progression we can easily discern from the history of art, philosophy, science, etc. And your view is admittedly dualistic in an absolute sense. [/quote]

You can argue that dualism between mind and matter is the same as dualism between god and mind, but that is based on your assumed conclusion. The dualism between mind and matter only really got started about 400 years ago. There have always been parallel streams of dualism / monism between mind and god. Perhaps the pantheist view was the majority, but the Judeo-Christian tradition changed that for the west. Interestingly, as the dualism between mind and matter grew, at the same time, among those who didn't see a duality between mind and matter, the duality between god and creation collapsed. So the whole thing turned upside down. This is why the church has generally just stuck with philosophy up to Aquinas. Even though the science from these earlier philosophers is obviously far out of date, the rest of philosophy since has gone down inevitably fissile paths by making one of these two fundamental errors.

[AshvinP]

I'm not at all certain there's a meaningful difference between an ontology in which there is just no ground underlying the relationships that give being to beings and an ontology in which there is a ground underlying those relationships, but that ground has no qualities, properties, traits, and cannot be described or defined in any way except by reference to the relationships it engenders. "Ground" in this case simply gestures at a pure, contentless presence, which in its contentlessness seems to me indistinguishable from absence, a being that is indistinguishable from nothing. It's a capacity, which is to say, an emptiness, but one not demarcated with limits (as in the emptiness inside a cup). If the ground, by virtue of being pure presence or pure being or pure mind, is an unlimited emptiness, distinguishable from nothing by nothing, then arguing over whether there is or isn't a ground seems to me to be trying to make conceptual thought do what by its nature it just can't -- with a nod to Alan Watts, it seems a bit like trying to bite one's own teeth.

If I could upvote this comment, I would. I think this is why many philosophies have given up on trying to describe it. They recognize that the dichotomies we make are themselves relative.

Ponder this - if anyone was satisfied with such a low resolution understanding of the ultimate Ground, then why would they still be inquiring to it? Why would you or anyone else be on this forum trying to discuss metaphysical issues which are surely trivial compared to the essence of our Ground? Our lack of satisfaction is Nature's way of telling us there is much more finer resolution of the Ground to be gained from thoughtful contemplation.