Seeing the truth is not conductive to survival

[SanteriSatama]

this wisdom is immediately accessible at our fingertips, so no such excuses remain.

Indeed.

[DandelionSoul]

I think I share your concern with that general idea, especially as it is expressed in fundamentalist theology of "escaping from the world" into the "afterlife".

Right, that’s definitely one manifestation of it, but not the only one. McKenna’s Transcendental Object at the End of Time. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. Origen’s Apocatastasis. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich. Manifest Destiny. Global Communism. Technocratic Transhumanist Utopia. Basically, I’m objecting to any idea that’s premised on the notion that there’s a particular way the world ought to be (whether we have a clear picture of it yet or not) and that we can or will or should move toward the particular way the world ought to be: that all of history is ultimately to culminate in a singular vision in which all disparate perspectives are fully and finally unified. You could call that notion, as a whole, eschatology, or teleology, but I don’t want to get overly invested in a label for it, so long as you understand the impulse I’m gesturing at.

I am not trying to equate all these to each other in terms of the damage they have done or the suffering they have caused; obviously McKenna’s Transcendental Object has not caused nearly the extent of suffering of the notion of the Thousand Year Reich. Instead I’m trying to draw out that family resemblance between all of those notions to lay it bare as what I think might be the source of our downstream disagreements about purpose and meaning and so on.

For one thing, our Earthly evolution still has a long ways to go

This is what I mean. A long way to go toward what? When I use “a long way to go,” there is usually an end state that I can, however fuzzily, picture and compare to the present to gauge the distance (in whatever sense of the term “distance” and by whatever metric) between here and there. For instance, “My singing has improved, but it’s got a long way to go” suggests a specific direction of progress, even if it’s not stated outright: how well I’d like to sing, whatever I mean by “singing well.” Evolution to me seems nondirectional, and while I agree it will likely continue for a long time, I don’t think it’s going anywhere in particular.

The only question is, do we take seriously this inseparable connection between the spiritual and the physical and therefore acknowledge it is progressing in a certain direction away from the physical forms which are sheaths for our souls?

It seems to me that we can do one of those: we can take seriously the inseparable connection between the spiritual and the physical, or we can view the physical as “sheaths for our souls” and imagine that we are, or could be, or should be progressing away from it.

I would say it's pretty clear that nothing in the physical forms we currently perceive is a permanent state of affairs - it simply cannot be that way under my metamorphic view.

You are correct -- the only permanent state of affairs is the state of flux itself.

None of these conclusions should have anything to do with how I feel about them or what seems "fair" or "equitable" or anything of that sort - I view that as a particularly harmful form of arrogance in the modern age, where we assume our extremely limited perspective on living Cosmic forces can capture and assess the totality of their essence and, moreover, dictate what they should be as opposed to what they are.

We are mostly agreed here, but I suspect it will be an agreement that quickly diverges. I think the search for something immortal, something permanent, something eternal, some way of getting a grip on the Big Picture, some Great Cosmic Order, has been with us for a very long time, considerably predating modernity. In the end, we’re buying into the same lie our mythic ancestors did -- that if only we could attain to the Knowledge of Good and Evil, if only we could arrive at that place, we would surely not die. Maybe it won’t be this life, or maybe it won’t be the next, or the next, or the next, but somewhere along the long cycle of reincarnation, we will grasp the One Truth about what we are and, in so doing, transcend these dying forms forever.

Anyway, if we are talking about "low resolution", then this topic remains at the epitome of low resolution for that reason and, for all intents and purposes now, the Christ-being is our highest Self within which we are metamorphosing towards becoming.

When you say “Christ-being,” do you mean to gesture at something other than Jesus of Nazareth? When you say “highest Self,” do you mean a singular self that ultimately all our apparently-disparate selves will turn out to be?

[AshvinP]

I think I share your concern with that general idea, especially as it is expressed in fundamentalist theology of "escaping from the world" into the "afterlife".

Right, that’s definitely one manifestation of it, but not the only one. McKenna’s Transcendental Object at the End of Time. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. Origen’s Apocatastasis. Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich. Manifest Destiny. Global Communism. Technocratic Transhumanist Utopia. Basically, I’m objecting to any idea that’s premised on the notion that there’s a particular way the world ought to be (whether we have a clear picture of it yet or not) and that we can or will or should move toward the particular way the world ought to be: that all of history is ultimately to culminate in a singular vision in which all disparate perspectives are fully and finally unified. You could call that notion, as a whole, eschatology, or teleology, but I don’t want to get overly invested in a label for it, so long as you understand the impulse I’m gesturing at.

I am not trying to equate all these to each other in terms of the damage they have done or the suffering they have caused; obviously McKenna’s Transcendental Object has not caused nearly the extent of suffering of the notion of the Thousand Year Reich. Instead I’m trying to draw out that family resemblance between all of those notions to lay it bare as what I think might be the source of our downstream disagreements about purpose and meaning and so on.

For one thing, our Earthly evolution still has a long ways to go

This is what I mean. A long way to go toward what? When I use “a long way to go,” there is usually an end state that I can, however fuzzily, picture and compare to the present to gauge the distance (in whatever sense of the term “distance” and by whatever metric) between here and there. For instance, “My singing has improved, but it’s got a long way to go” suggests a specific direction of progress, even if it’s not stated outright: how well I’d like to sing, whatever I mean by “singing well.” Evolution to me seems nondirectional, and while I agree it will likely continue for a long time, I don’t think it’s going anywhere in particular.

I get what you are saying. We should keep in mind that these things are put forth in so many forms and have such staying power because they reflect something we intuitively understand about the nature of the Cosmos. But we have no idea why or how in the modern age and we certainly do not want to make any effort to figure it out, so we end up clinging to various dogmas about an eternal "destiny" that unifies all that we want to unify and provide some shadow of meaning in our lives that is no longer inherent to our experience, especially since the "death of God" in the 18-19th century. That being said, it was my mistake to use the phrase "a long ways to go". I am definitely not trying to argue that we should start from a notion of how the world ought to be and then figure out how it is based on that.

All I want to point out right now is that the spiritual evolution is occurring, which I think we both agree with. Reality is, in fact, spiritual, i.e. we all exist in a unified spiritual realm (or we could call it an "ideal realm" or realm of "idea-beings"), and it is evolving. You may not agree with the "unified" part if you don't consider yourself a monist - in which case, I wonder whether you have a position on that metaphysical issue? You are right to say we should not presuppose any final destiny or even some overarching purpose independent of us (which was the main point of Steiner's quote that I provided). Everything must be verified through experience and effort over the course of this life and many lives after. We may disagree on that last part too, in which case I will just keep the metamorphic process within this lifetime for now.

The only question is, do we take seriously this inseparable connection between the spiritual and the physical and therefore acknowledge it is progressing in a certain direction away from the physical forms which are sheaths for our souls?

It seems to me that we can do one of those: we can take seriously the inseparable connection between the spiritual and the physical, or we can view the physical as “sheaths for our souls” and imagine that we are, or could be, or should be progressing away from it.

I would say it's pretty clear that nothing in the physical forms we currently perceive is a permanent state of affairs - it simply cannot be that way under my metamorphic view.

You are correct -- the only permanent state of affairs is the state of flux itself.

Another poorly phrased point by me. What I mean is that, in essence, the spiritual is the physical and vice versa. Many various analogies are used to communicate that fact in idealist philosophy and I am sure you aware of some. Do you hold the "physical body" to be different in essence from the soul or spirit? If so, then we have a major disagreement there. To attain any higher resolution on what is occurring in the metamorphic progression, we must distinguish between body, soul, and spirit, but I never divide them in essence. I am going to paste below an image of the sort of progression I am speaking of in our return to the spiritual (created by Owen Barfield).

None of these conclusions should have anything to do with how I feel about them or what seems "fair" or "equitable" or anything of that sort - I view that as a particularly harmful form of arrogance in the modern age, where we assume our extremely limited perspective on living Cosmic forces can capture and assess the totality of their essence and, moreover, dictate what they should be as opposed to what they are.

We are mostly agreed here, but I suspect it will be an agreement that quickly diverges. I think the search for something immortal, something permanent, something eternal, some way of getting a grip on the Big Picture, some Great Cosmic Order, has been with us for a very long time, considerably predating modernity. In the end, we’re buying into the same lie our mythic ancestors did -- that if only we could attain to the Knowledge of Good and Evil, if only we could arrive at that place, we would surely not die. Maybe it won’t be this life, or maybe it won’t be the next, or the next, or the next, but somewhere along the long cycle of reincarnation, we will grasp the One Truth about what we are and, in so doing, transcend these dying forms forever.

Yes we definitely diverge here, partly for the reason I mentioned above. But I think you are also falling prey to arguing from how the world "ought to be" in the opposite direction - because the permanence-eternality aspect of prior world-conceptions has led to many problems in your view (and I certainly acknowledge those), then any such aspect in any world-conception becomes "the same lie our mythic ancestors" accepted naively. That is no different from the "ought to be" fallacy in my view. Also, I do not hold our mythic ancestors bought into any lie, rather they directly experienced what we now call "imaginations" and "intuitions" and had no choice but to accept them naively. That is what we find reflected in the ancient mythologies of the world. We now have a choice whether we want to come to know from within what they experienced naively from without.

Anyway, if we are talking about "low resolution", then this topic remains at the epitome of low resolution for that reason and, for all intents and purposes now, the Christ-being is our highest Self within which we are metamorphosing towards becoming.

When you say “Christ-being,” do you mean to gesture at something other than Jesus of Nazareth? When you say “highest Self,” do you mean a singular self that ultimately all our apparently-disparate selves will turn out to be?

No, I mean Christ incarnate in Jesus. Yes I do mean a unified Self that we all are, in essence.

[DandelionSoul]

We should keep in mind that these things are put forth in so many forms and have such staying power because they reflect something we intuitively understand about the nature of the Cosmos.

I suspect that they pop up over and over again because we resent that we will die, and we fear death, and we convince ourselves that we won’t by recourse to some story about how, in fact, we are immortal -- perhaps our bodies will die, but our souls won’t, or perhaps our souls will die, but the Eternal Self won’t, or however we like it. Although, this notion of “intuitive understanding of the Cosmos” is interesting to me: since this intuition sits at the root of a whole lot of reflection and discourse and grounds it, well, it must be prior to what it grounds, yeah? So how do you account for the presence of that intuition in the first place?

But we have no idea why or how in the modern age and we certainly do not want to make any effort to figure it out, so we end up clinging to various dogmas about an eternal "destiny" that unifies all that we want to unify

This is, to some extent, true: many people who bother seeking some Big Meaning at all will ultimately try to swallow a system someone else came up with. On the other hand, there are the Big System Builders -- the theologians and spiritual leaders and religion founders and philosophers who provide the buffet of possible Big Meanings that people can choose from. And for most of them, I’m hesitant to say that they didn’t want to make any effort to figure out their sense of meaning.

In any case, though, I’ve always been fond of the expression, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” And to some extent, I suspect we can’t help “killing the Buddha.” After all, to read is always already to interpret. They’re one and the same act. Nevertheless, I grew up in a tradition where it wasn’t uncommon to hear the preacher say something like, “I’m just a messenger. It’s the plain reading of the Bible” as though there were such a thing and he weren’t actively interpreting the Bible as he was reading it, and I suspect that just that sort of disavowal of epistemic responsibility is pretty common. After all, how many dogmatic materialists will say, “It’s just science”?

and provide some shadow of meaning in our lives that is no longer inherent to our experience, especially since the "death of God" in the 18-19th century.

It’s interesting you should mention that, because mid-twentieth-century Death of God theology forms one of the streams of influence in my own thought. Paul Hessert’s Christ and the End of Meaning is kind of hard to find, but it’s a good place to start.

(There are lots of streams of influence in my own thought -- as you can imagine, I haven’t yet met an author whom I’ve agreed with fully, and very few with whom I’ve disagreed fully. It’s funny how if you read enough, the authors start arguing with each other in your head.)

All I want to point out right now is that the spiritual evolution is occurring, which I think we both agree with. Reality is, in fact, spiritual, i.e. we all exist in a unified spiritual realm (or we could call it an "ideal realm" or realm of "idea-beings"), and it is evolving.

Whew, lots of conceptually heavy terms here! If by “evolving” we mean “in flux,” that any given present form is impermanent, then I’m on-board with that. If we mean to import a direction -- evolving toward some outcome (however veiled it might be to us for now), well... I suppose if I agreed with that, this would be a short conversation.

“Spiritual” or “ideal” or something like that -- sure, but, again, I want to be careful not to say more than I mean. For instance, your Eternal Ego Self is not something I buy. Rather, “the physical” is the word we’ve given to the point of contact; the body is the site of encounter. That is to say, your thoughts and will and so on don’t reach me until they reach my body, and mine don’t reach you until they reach your body.

You may not agree with the "unified" part if you don't consider yourself a monist - in which case, I wonder whether you have a position on that metaphysical issue?

Sure. My position is that neither the One nor the Many is fundamental -- the One is really the Many and the Many are really the One. This is an area where I find fault with most ontologies: they try to subsume one of those categories into the other. Ultimately that’s what I mean by “monism”: the belief that plurality, that distinction, is illusory, that the Many reduce to the One. So reality is unified, and it’s not unified. I suppose we could call my position antireductionism: all apparent lines of demarcation can be problematized, but, by turns, so can every apparent unifying category. That’s why I use the term “nondualism.” “Nondual” -- not-two -- is a purely negative term for an ontology whose positive expression is inexhaustible.

We may disagree on that last part too, in which case I will just keep the metamorphic process within this lifetime for now.

I don’t disagree that What-Is which is you is also the What-Is which is me, and my grandmother, and each bacterium in my stomach. And there is a sense, of course, in which I am what I am through what you are, and what my grandmother was, and what the bacteria in my stomach are -- I like Thich Nhat Hanh’s word “interbeing” for this. And so whatever is learned and verified in one lifetime ultimately finds expression through many lifetimes. It may end up being overturned in some other lifetimes, then reestablished in yet others, or synthesized in new ways, or just forgotten. “Learning” and “verification” are always temporal and provisional.

With that said, I don’t believe there’s some kind of personal structure, some aspect of my individual soul, that survives death in order to be reincarnated, such that there will (for example) arrive an infant carrying memories of my experiences. Remember that I affirmed with you the “inseparable connection between the spiritual and the physical.” This non-survival is key to the differences between me and a whole lot of metaphysics and theologies I’ve come across, most of which seem to be seeking out some way of justifying the idea that we survive death.

(Even secular, materialist people with a poetic streak will sometimes twist themselves in knots talking about how the heat in our bodies disperses and is carried by the Universe forever or literally anything to keep from facing death squarely.)

Do you hold the "physical body" to be different in essence from the soul or spirit? If so, then we have a major disagreement there. To attain any higher resolution on what is occurring in the metamorphic progression, we must distinguish between body, soul, and spirit, but I never divide them in essence.

I don’t hold them to be different in essence, and I think that distinction can be useful in some contexts. There’s a danger that “distinguishing” becomes “reifying the distinction,” and I think that’s what I’m smelling in the talk about escaping the physical.

I am going to paste below an image of the sort of progression I am speaking of in our return to the spiritual (created by Owen Barfield).

Oof, talk about low resolution! I tried to zoom in to the image in the hopes of reading the text on it but it’s largely illegible to me.

But I think you are also falling prey to arguing from how the world "ought to be" in the opposite direction - because the permanence-eternality aspect of prior world-conceptions has led to many problems in your view (and I certainly acknowledge those), then any such aspect in any world-conception becomes "the same lie our mythic ancestors" accepted naively. That is no different from the "ought to be" fallacy in my view

I agree and disagree with you. I agree that I think that if the consequences of totalizing world narratives have been, on the whole, terrible, then that should prompt a hard look at the tree the fruit is growing from. I’m open to the possibility that the hard look will reveal something about the Bad Totalizing Stories that’s missing from some of the others, and for that reason I disagree that I’m beginning with a fallacious presupposition. Incidentally, I wasn’t always the pluralist weirdo I am today. I began in just such a view, then moved through several others in a... well... metamorphic progression, you might say. I find some of them insightful, and others I find beautiful (Hart’s Universalism is almost exactly the view I held a decade ago, for instance, and it’s lovely), and I continue to find in them valuable conversation partners. At the end of the day, I just don’t agree with them. I see them as untruthful. And for me, it’s the same basic untruth, whether it’s spawning compassion and poetry or, well, death camps and gulags.

Also, I do not hold our mythic ancestors bought into any lie, rather they directly experienced what we now call "imaginations" and "intuitions" and had no choice but to accept them naively. That is what we find reflected in the ancient mythologies of the world. We now have a choice whether we want to come to know from within what they experienced naively from without.

Oh, I meant our mythic ancestors as in the myth of Adam and Eve being deceived by the serpent in the Garden. That’s the lie they bought into: “You will not surely die.” So long as we let ourselves believe that lie, so long as we keep chasing the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth or whatever image-symbol you want to use for immortality, we remain enslaved to death. I was going to go on, but I wrote a short piece ages ago where I kind of unpack this whole idea and I have to go to bed soon, so instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ll just leave this here.

No, I mean Christ incarnate in Jesus. Yes I do mean a unified Self that we all are, in essence.

Oh, I’m looking forward to this branch of the conversation. I don’t have time to type a whole lot more, but let me ask you this before I go: what do you suppose happens to our ostensibly individual and distinct selves as we -- per your perspective -- evolve into Christ?

[DandelionSoul]

Also, a touch off-topic, but do you ever imagine showing your current thoughts to your past self? I can't imagine what Rebecca of 2005 would've thought of the ideas of Rebecca of 2021, but I can only imagine that she would not have liked them (this thought was, itself, prompted by the discussion on death and the reflections I linked you to), and it's kinda funny to me to imagine it.

[Soul_of_Shu]

My position is that neither the One nor the Many is fundamental -- the One is really the Many and the Many are really the One. This is an area where I find fault with most ontologies: they try to subsume one of those categories into the other. Ultimately that’s what I mean by “monism”: the belief that plurality, that distinction, is illusory, that the Many reduce to the One. So reality is unified, and it’s not unified. I suppose we could call my position antireductionism: all apparent lines of demarcation can be problematized, but, by turns, so can every apparent unifying category. That’s why I use the term “nondualism.” “Nondual” -- not-two -- is a purely negative term for an ontology whose positive expression is inexhaustible.

I mostly resonate with this—i.e. the One is the Many, and the Many are the One—however if the One/Many fusion can't be reduced to some prior non-conscious state, thus making consciousness the irreducible, uncaused ontological primitive, which the One/Many can't be apart from, then isn't this still essentially a monist ontology, if ultimately there is only consciousness? Also just seems an extrapolation of the Heart Sutra's aphorism: 'formlessness is not other than form, and form not other than formlessness', if the one equates with formlessness, and the many with form ... no?

[AshvinP]

We should keep in mind that these things are put forth in so many forms and have such staying power because they reflect something we intuitively understand about the nature of the Cosmos.

I suspect that they pop up over and over again because we resent that we will die, and we fear death, and we convince ourselves that we won’t by recourse to some story about how, in fact, we are immortal -- perhaps our bodies will die, but our souls won’t, or perhaps our souls will die, but the Eternal Self won’t, or however we like it. Although, this notion of “intuitive understanding of the Cosmos” is interesting to me: since this intuition sits at the root of a whole lot of reflection and discourse and grounds it, well, it must be prior to what it grounds, yeah? So how do you account for the presence of that intuition in the first place?

But we have no idea why or how in the modern age and we certainly do not want to make any effort to figure it out, so we end up clinging to various dogmas about an eternal "destiny" that unifies all that we want to unify

This is, to some extent, true: many people who bother seeking some Big Meaning at all will ultimately try to swallow a system someone else came up with. On the other hand, there are the Big System Builders -- the theologians and spiritual leaders and religion founders and philosophers who provide the buffet of possible Big Meanings that people can choose from. And for most of them, I’m hesitant to say that they didn’t want to make any effort to figure out their sense of meaning.

In any case, though, I’ve always been fond of the expression, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” And to some extent, I suspect we can’t help “killing the Buddha.” After all, to read is always already to interpret. They’re one and the same act. Nevertheless, I grew up in a tradition where it wasn’t uncommon to hear the preacher say something like, “I’m just a messenger. It’s the plain reading of the Bible” as though there were such a thing and he weren’t actively interpreting the Bible as he was reading it, and I suspect that just that sort of disavowal of epistemic responsibility is pretty common. After all, how many dogmatic materialists will say, “It’s just science”?

That bolded part is not an explanation, though. It is frequently mistaken for an explanation, but it's not. This happens a lot in materialist Darwinian theory, for ex. - we will ask about a certain trait of our psychic life and the materialist Darwinian will say that is explained by the fact that "it helped people survive in this or that way a long time ago". It may have a very well helped people survive, in fact that is very likely, but that does nothing to explain the essence of what it is. Similarly, the "terror management" psychologists try to explain all of religion and spirituality in that way, and the Freudians in a slightly different but similar way. Ultimately, I would trace all of that back to Cartesian rationalism and the notion that if we can link a phenomenon to some psychological state, then we have exhaustively explained it. I don't agree, rather I think we have explained almost none of it with such attribution. That is what really set apart Jung from Freud - the former realized ancient spiritual traditions spoke to a much deeper essence than any personal fear or desire, hence coming forth with the notion of a "collective unconscious".

re: intuitive understanding - I account for it by saying the fundamental reality is all conscious activity and that we all inhabit the same unified (or contiguous) realm of that activity. So the Big System Builders (BSB), especially those tied to spirituality, are drawing from that same 'space' of intuitive meaning and presenting it through their own individual personalities with all manner of unexamined assumptions and cultural baggage. Even the materialists are doing that, but they also add a whole extra layer of abstract concepts related to "matter" onto it and, in the process, empty the foundational mental dynamics of any meaning. The BSBs of the modern era, save for a select few, have universally failed to account for Thinking activity in their conceptual frameworks, like the intuitive knowing. That is what fundamentally leads them astray, in my view. It allows them to remain in the realm of abstract intellect and avoid the hard work of gaining higher resolution on their conceptual framework via Thinking.

I agree that "to read is to interpret", and theoretically there are an infinite number of interpretations for any given text. Yet the number of interpretations which can be possibly useful to the person reading it are much more limited, and the number which will fit into an ideal network of concepts and meaning which make sense of our experience are much more limited still. That is the process of gaining the higher resolution that I am speaking of via reason, imagination, and intuition. It is much easier to say "there are infinite number of interpretations, so I am going to discard them all and stop looking for the most valid one", but that does not mean there are no valid ones in connection to our practical aims in life. There are only a few which connect to those practical aims and, ultimately, only one that will truly make sense of our ever-expanding experience and knowledge (I mean to take the concept of "interpretation" very loosely here and not as "this series of words must equal this precise meaning and nothing else").

We can imagine looking out at a multitude of objects and activities happening in the park on a nice day without any interpretation - that would be a "blooming buzzing confusion". Then we begin to realize there are infinite number of concepts we can attach to the perceptions. I can take the concept of "kid with kite" and attach it to the perception of old man with seeing eye dog, or the concept of "basketball" and attach it to the perception of tennis ball. All of these things can be done but very few of them will make sense of my experience when I try to relate the meanings together and develop an understanding of the entire panorama of perceptions as a whole. This "analogy" is actually more literal than we usually imagine - it is only through these knowing faculties that we do not, in fact, only perceive "blooming buzzing confusion" all the time as we are 'reading' and 'interpreting' the sense-world around us.

I will circle back to the rest of your post a little later, as I can see they will each take a good deal of typing and I haven't even had any coffee yet I want to add here, though, that I really appreciate this discussion with you and your very considered responses and desire for genuine dialogue!

[SanteriSatama]

My position is that neither the One nor the Many is fundamental -- the One is really the Many and the Many are really the One. This is an area where I find fault with most ontologies: they try to subsume one of those categories into the other. Ultimately that’s what I mean by “monism”: the belief that plurality, that distinction, is illusory, that the Many reduce to the One. So reality is unified, and it’s not unified. I suppose we could call my position antireductionism: all apparent lines of demarcation can be problematized, but, by turns, so can every apparent unifying category. That’s why I use the term “nondualism.” “Nondual” -- not-two -- is a purely negative term for an ontology whose positive expression is inexhaustible.

I mostly resonate with this—i.e. the One is the Many, and the Many are the One—however if the One/Many fusion can't be reduced to some prior non-conscious state, thus making consciousness the irreducible, uncaused ontological primitive, which the One/Many can't be apart from, then isn't this still essentially a monist ontology, if ultimately there is only consciousness? Also just seems an extrapolation of the Heart Sutra's aphorism: 'formlessness is not other than form, and form not other than formlessness', if the one equates with formlessness, and the many with form ... no?

Before the question of monotheism vs. polytheism can arise, you need to subscribe in the service of the God of Number Theory (GNT). Is the metaphysical God of existential quantification last word on the issue, the end of theology? Nope.

Bergson's notion of duration is defined as neither unity nor multiplicity. So before GNT we can have Time, independent of GNT. So far Duration has been defined as negation of GNT, but can we have an affirmative expression for duration? Yes, we can. Duration can be defined also as both more and less.. And the definition can be further qualified as dynamic process of open interval. Potential infinity (instead of completed infinity), which is open and unbounded both externally and internally. The duration of an open interval can be written into formal language with relational operators: <>. And no need to throw the baby with the washwater, we can have discrete numbers too, but no longer as the master, but a servant and perhaps a friend. Static structures of discrete numbers can be derived from negation of the more-less process: neither more nor less, aka ><. From that we can derive closed intervals of both unity and multiplicity, e.g. the interval of rational numbers between 0 and 1.

Theology can be quite rational and rationally communicated in the Bergson-duration of open interval. No need for "credo quid absurdum est".

[Soul_of_Shu]

Before the question of monotheism vs. polytheism can arise, you need to subscribe in the service of the God of Number Theory (GNT). Is the metaphysical God of existential quantification last word on the issue, the end of theology? Nope.

Bergson's notion of duration is defined as neither unity nor multiplicity. So before GNT we can have Time, independent of GNT. So far Duration has been defined as negation of GNT, but can we have an affirmative expression for duration? Yes, we can. Duration can be defined also as both more and less.. And the definition can be further qualified as dynamic process of open interval. Potential infinity (instead of completed infinity), which is open and unbounded both externally and internally. The duration of an open interval can be written into formal language with relational operators: <>. And no need to throw the baby with the washwater, we can have discrete numbers too, but no longer as the master, but a servant and perhaps a friend. Static structures of discrete numbers can be derived from negation of the more-less process: neither more nor less, aka ><. From that we can derive closed intervals of both unity and multiplicity, e.g. the interval of rational numbers between 0 and 1.

Theology can be quite rational and rationally communicated in the Bergson-duration of open interval. No need for "credo quid absurdum est".

Alas SS, my fine forest-finn friend, your math remains like an elusive BDSM mistress (perhaps Mielikki in disguise?) that does not like to linger long in the airy bedroom of my mind, while I balk at her invitation to join her in some oubliette of number theory ... Mind you, the fetish-wear does look sexy

[AshvinP]

)

All I want to point out right now is that the spiritual evolution is occurring, which I think we both agree with. Reality is, in fact, spiritual, i.e. we all exist in a unified spiritual realm (or we could call it an "ideal realm" or realm of "idea-beings"), and it is evolving.

Whew, lots of conceptually heavy terms here! If by “evolving” we mean “in flux,” that any given present form is impermanent, then I’m on-board with that. If we mean to import a direction -- evolving toward some outcome (however veiled it might be to us for now), well... I suppose if I agreed with that, this would be a short conversation.

“Spiritual” or “ideal” or something like that -- sure, but, again, I want to be careful not to say more than I mean. For instance, your Eternal Ego Self is not something I buy. Rather, “the physical” is the word we’ve given to the point of contact; the body is the site of encounter. That is to say, your thoughts and will and so on don’t reach me until they reach my body, and mine don’t reach you until they reach your body.

We don't need to take anything about the flux on faith. But if we look at the progression, within any field, let's say Western philosophy from Heraclitus, master of flux, to German idealism, do you discern any pattern there or just attribute it to random flux which could have gone in any direction and just so happened to go the way it did?

You may not agree with the "unified" part if you don't consider yourself a monist - in which case, I wonder whether you have a position on that metaphysical issue?

Sure. My position is that neither the One nor the Many is fundamental -- the One is really the Many and the Many are really the One. This is an area where I find fault with most ontologies: they try to subsume one of those categories into the other. Ultimately that’s what I mean by “monism”: the belief that plurality, that distinction, is illusory, that the Many reduce to the One. So reality is unified, and it’s not unified. I suppose we could call my position antireductionism: all apparent lines of demarcation can be problematized, but, by turns, so can every apparent unifying category. That’s why I use the term “nondualism.” “Nondual” -- not-two -- is a purely negative term for an ontology whose positive expression is inexhaustible.

I agree with the above ontology as Soul_of_Shu stated it above. Scott (contributor to this forum) has written about it in terms of tetralemmic polarity and "mumorphism" (you could search for the latter term and find many posts on the forum). One and Many are two poles of the same underlying Power, the latter being ideational activity under idealism. I don't think the polarity holds up under any non-idealist ontology, but the polarity is fundamental to all experience so we cannot ditch that either. But we are in agreement on nondualism, I just further specify to idealism.