The Central Topic

[Anthony66]

I know you've touch on this subject from time to time, but how does SS approach the topic of God? From what I understand, such a being would be one with the unfolding reality, approachable via the gradients of our thinking activity. He would not sit on the other side of an unbridgeable chasm that can only be crossed via a vacuous leap of faith. Conversely, in our current state of evolution he is to be found far "behind the veil", essentially inaccessible to most.

In terms of the traditional language and descriptors used in Christian theology, what are reasonable? (given these are but conceptual designations):

• ground of being

• omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient

• infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth (Westminster Shorter Catechism)

Would we understand his being to in someway encompass all beings or is there some manner of separation?

Or are all such questions better left alone?

Before such questions can be addressed, we should really question our motives. It's no secret that the God question is very charged. Part of the reason is because in the last few centuries humanity has generally entered a stage where we did away with any higher Intelligence. For many this is connected with a feeling of relief. Richard Dawkins also uses such comparison. He says that most of the atheists he had 'converted' report a feeling of release, as if a great burden fell from their shoulders. And this is understandable. It's simply the feeling of not having to care for anything but our own desires and their intellectual justifications. There's no longer any need to be vigilant, to observe the kinds of thoughts and feelings that pass through our soul and to try to guide them (except for compliance with agreed upon social and legal norms).

We should really get a good feeling for this. We should be perfectly clear of this tendency in us, to feel as top level authority which has simply decided to behave within a consensual system. Not because there's anything inherently true, good, right, etc. in that system but because it would be too much trouble if misbehaving. From this modern stage, the questions about God can become very misleading. That's why I wouldn't go into your questions now. Not because we can't speak of them in any meaningful way but because it would be useless unless the ground is cleared.

The question of God will have to be approached from another side. Trying to list the attributes of the Divine secretly puts us in the Flat MAL picture, where we imagine a grand Divine Bubble that we try to characterize. The questions one secretly asks are "Is there such Bubble at all? If yes, is it worth my time to seek some relationship with it?"

This is related to the two questions.

In other places we could speak differently but in this forum, where almost everyone has built some conception of MAL, we can't make even a step forward unless one tries to meditate on the question: "What is the nature of the 'spiritual space' between the souls?". Everyone would merrily use the metaphor of vortex of consciousness but what is the medium between the vortices? Of course the templated answer would be "consciousness!" But do we really try to understand the consequences of our thus abstractly posed answer?

Seriously, I don't know for how many times already we arrive at this point. Before asking about the attributes of God, we should be clear with ourselves if we are capable of thinking about be-ing in a way different than nicely spatially separated bubbles/vortices.

Unless one feels a glaring insufficiency in the 'spiritual vacuum model' (dark/instinctive/unconscious spiritual space between vortices) then it's quite useless to speak about attributes of God because the latter will be considered to be nothing but yet another grand vortex in the flat spiritual vacuum, around which smaller vortices decide to orbit.

They question to meditate on is "What is the nature of be-ing (if any) which is responsible for the 'fluctuations' of the 'spiritual vacuum' - both intra- and inter- human vortex. If one doesn't feel this question to be central to the mystery of our existence, it's quite pointless to speak of anything else.

I'm not sure why you often require the questioner to demonstrate their worthiness before addressing an issue, asking them to repeatedly draw Excalibur out of the stone so to speak. I can assure you my questions are genuine and I'm trying my very hardest to understand a framework of reality which is very difficult for the modernist mind to understand. I'm equally prepared to land before the demands of a supreme intelligence or face the abyss of the void.

[Cleric K]

I'm not sure why you often require the questioner to demonstrate their worthiness before addressing an issue, asking them to repeatedly draw Excalibur out of the stone so to speak. I can assure you my questions are genuine and I'm trying my very hardest to understand a framework of reality which is very difficult for the modernist mind to understand. I'm equally prepared to land before the demands of a supreme intelligence or face the abyss of the void.

Sorry Anthony, I'm not testing anyone for being worthy. It's precisely because the things seem to be difficult for the modernist mind to understand, that I try to point directly at the core issues. If these questions are addressed up front, years of wandering in viscous cycles can be saved.

We could have easily addressed the Divine attributes. Imagine I've confirmed some or most of the attributes you listed. I could have said "Yes, God is good, benevolent, he's the creator of everything" etc. Then what? This in itself doesn't lead anywhere because the modernist mind no longer knows how to think about God. Is he instinctive nothingness? Is he a giant vortex? Is he a white-bearded old man? In other words, everyone has some a priori (usually quite instinctive and unexamined) way of thinking about these things and then tries to arrange the modern concepts along.

[Anthony66]

I'm not sure why you often require the questioner to demonstrate their worthiness before addressing an issue, asking them to repeatedly draw Excalibur out of the stone so to speak. I can assure you my questions are genuine and I'm trying my very hardest to understand a framework of reality which is very difficult for the modernist mind to understand. I'm equally prepared to land before the demands of a supreme intelligence or face the abyss of the void.

Sorry Anthony, I'm not testing anyone for being worthy. It's precisely because the things seem to be difficult for the modernist mind to understand, that I try to point directly at the core issues. If these questions are addressed up front, years of wandering in viscous cycles can be saved.

We could have easily addressed the Divine attributes. Imagine I've confirmed some or most of the attributes you listed. I could have said "Yes, God is good, benevolent, he's the creator of everything" etc. Then what? This in itself doesn't lead anywhere because the modernist mind no longer knows how to think about God. Is he instinctive nothingness? Is he a giant vortex? Is he a white-bearded old man? In other words, everyone has some a priori (usually quite instinctive and unexamined) way of thinking about these things and then tries to arrange the modern concepts along.

How then should be approach the divine or deep mind?

[Cleric K]

How then should be approach the divine or deep mind?

We need to understand how our subconscious processes precipitate into consciousness and how we should relate to them.

It's clear that what we think at any given moment is only the focal point of a flow through the invisible riverbed. The materialist would say that consciousness is only the final screen, where the pixels result from deeper neural processing.

What is your stance on this? Does it make sense to you to think of the hidden processes not as mechanical computation in the dark but as something living as spiritual 'computation' within the flow of which our waking thoughts are embedded?

Sometimes we say "I have to remember to take the kids from school". This is relatively easy to picture mechanically. It's like we consciously etch something in the riverbed in a clever way. We place a stone that will gradually be eroded and will turn over at the right time. When that happens we'll remember why we placed the stone. This doesn't require anything mysterious to explain. We can think of the subconscious as purely mechanical riverbed that we engineer with our thoughts.

But what about more complex cases? Imagine that we're working on something that requires a spark of insight. We need some inspiration to find the right solution to a problem. We can't simply place a stone to remind us anything because we don't know what we need to be reminded of. This is very rich topic for meditation. What stance would we take? Do we imagine that the subconscious processing is like random generator and we simply hope that at some point it will spit out what we need? Or it understands our thoughts, our goals and we can work together?

It's clear that we can never raise to levels of consciousness which reveal glimpses of the kind of processes that happens beyond the threshold of the intellect, if we a priori assume that these processes are purely mechanical and that everything below our ego is less and less conscious.

So this is the first step - we need to be open for the possibility that the subconscious (from our waking perspective) layers of the soul are not simply some subtle automata but are weaved of ideal activity. It might be helpful if we consider that not only these processes are not dark and unconscious in their essence but that actually our waking thoughts are only more constricted and dim precipitations of these processes. Some time ago I used this Escher's painting as a metaphor:



It is helpful to think of our thoughts only as sparks precipitating from a world of Light. Only with this attitude we can have the needed openness and humility to seek the fuller consciousness where the deeper layers of our soul weave.

And as far as the Divine depth is concerned - there's no hard boundary. The deeper we go into the soul, the less the time-ideas living there govern our purely personal life and the more they are concerned with how this life harmonizes with the musical Cosmic Life. Ultimately, at its 'upper limit', our soul is the Universe. Thus we approach the Divine in proportion to how much of the Divine Life we allow to flow through us.

[AshvinP]

It may also be helpful to remember in Western spiritual tradition, man is the imago dei, the 'image of God'. Clearly this was never intended to mean the physical perceptual structures of man directly reflect God himself, not even for the most literal minded creationists. The real resemblance comes in the deep archetypal meaning of man's durational and evolving activity, of which our current state is always only a seed which can unfold into this higher potential. Modern thinking allows us to discover the shadows of these meaningful principles, which we then calls 'laws of nature', 'mathematical systems', archetypes, etc. Yet these laws have been externalized, i.e. disconnected from their relation to our own soul, and therefore lack the qualitative aspect and the depth structure of that aspect. Everything is flattened out, even within most psychological theory.

I know you've touch on this subject from time to time, but how does SS approach the topic of God? From what I understand, such a being would be one with the unfolding reality, approachable via the gradients of our thinking activity. He would not sit on the other side of an unbridgeable chasm that can only be crossed via a vacuous leap of faith. Conversely, in our current state of evolution he is to be found far "behind the veil", essentially inaccessible to most.

In terms of the traditional language and descriptors used in Christian theology, what are reasonable? (given these are but conceptual designations):

• ground of being

• omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient

• infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth (Westminster Shorter Catechism)

Would we understand his being to in someway encompass all beings or is there some manner of separation?

Or are all such questions better left alone?

I think Cleric gave a great answer to the last question, which we could sum up as, "yes for now, until we properly orient our perspective on our own existence and consciousness". Until that orientation happens, we are simply a long way off from understanding theology. At the same time, the process of orienting our perspective is also the process of answering our theological questions without reliance on traditional doctrine or dogma. There is very little more freeing than this inner revelation, in my experience so far. On this Easter weekend, it's really disappointing for me to consider how many people are simply going through the religious motions, without any sense of the deeper Spirit at work in the world. SS is all about freeing the Spirit within us by becoming more conscious of it.

I would also point to my discussion with Grant on the other thread. Many of our questions about essential relations simply presuppose that intellectual concepts can be combined together in various ways to gain greater understanding of those relations, like that between God and man. It's not that the concepts are inaccurate or wrong - it's that they are way too flattened, mineralized, vague, abstract, etc., devoid of the life needed to actually promote essential understanding of the meaningful principles at work. Unfortunately, modern theology, like modern thinking in general, has no appreciation of how senseless it is to try and capture Divine truths in various propositional creeds.

[Anthony66]

On this Easter weekend, it's really disappointing for me to consider how many people are simply going through the religious motions, without any sense of the deeper Spirit at work in the world....It's not that the concepts are inaccurate or wrong - it's that they are way too flattened, mineralized, vague, abstract, etc., devoid of the life needed to actually promote essential understanding of the meaningful principles at work. Unfortunately, modern theology, like modern thinking in general, has no appreciation of how senseless it is to try and capture Divine truths in various propositional creeds.

Is there any sense of the prophet bringing back the Divine truths from the mountain top to the masses?

The reformed Christian speaks of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit which enables them to commune with God and discern the true meaning of scripture.

The Pentecostal has the inner filling of the Holy Spirit which causes them to dance around and fall over under its power. They speak confidently of the nature of God.

The likes of Jonathan Pageau discerns the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world which tell us about God.

David Bentley Hart speaks of the desires in the human soul which can only be satisfied by the boundless richness of a perfect and immediate knowledge of the wellsprings of all Being. One can infer from this the perfections of God.

Frank Turek argues that CRIMES (Causality, Reason, Information, Morality, Evil, Science) can only find their grounding in God and this can tell us about the nature of God.

I offer here this scattered survey of the sort of things the various mountain top visits have returned to us. There are of course many more. Has SS its tablets, carved by the finger of God?

You speak of the reorientation of our thinking in order to experience these thing aright. But perhaps those surveyed above have done that to a degree and are reporting back?? Or is any reporting back confined to mere abstraction given the limitation of language and concepts and should we therefore say, "Yes, that's all very interesting", but ignore and continue to focus on our own transformation?

[AshvinP]

On this Easter weekend, it's really disappointing for me to consider how many people are simply going through the religious motions, without any sense of the deeper Spirit at work in the world....It's not that the concepts are inaccurate or wrong - it's that they are way too flattened, mineralized, vague, abstract, etc., devoid of the life needed to actually promote essential understanding of the meaningful principles at work. Unfortunately, modern theology, like modern thinking in general, has no appreciation of how senseless it is to try and capture Divine truths in various propositional creeds.

Is there any sense of the prophet bringing back the Divine truths from the mountain top to the masses?

The reformed Christian speaks of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit which enables them to commune with God and discern the true meaning of scripture.

The Pentecostal has the inner filling of the Holy Spirit which causes them to dance around and fall over under its power. They speak confidently of the nature of God.

The likes of Jonathan Pageau discerns the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world which tell us about God.

David Bentley Hart speaks of the desires in the human soul which can only be satisfied by the boundless richness of a perfect and immediate knowledge of the wellsprings of all Being. One can infer from this the perfections of God.

Frank Turek argues that CRIMES (Causality, Reason, Information, Morality, Evil, Science) can only find their grounding in God and this can tell us about the nature of God.

I offer here this scattered survey of the sort of things the various mountain top visits have returned to us. There are of course many more. Has SS its tablets, carved by the finger of God?

You speak of the reorientation of our thinking in order to experience these thing aright. But perhaps those surveyed above have done that to a degree and are reporting back?? Or is any reporting back confined to mere abstraction given the limitation of language and concepts and should we therefore say, "Yes, that's all very interesting", but ignore and continue to focus on our own transformation?

I think we should try to focus on our advantage here - familiarity with and, perhaps, conviction of philosophical idealism. Most people will have no idea what we are saying when soeaking in terms of nested Ideas of varying time-lengths which structure our unfolding experience. We can view all that we perceive outwardly and experience inwardly as structured in this way. The Idea which structures the season of Spring is of no difference essence than our microcosmic idea of 'what to do today' which structures our states of being and actions during the day. In that sense, you have already seeded in idea the overarching structure of what states of being you will experience hours from now.

The goal is to become more conscious of the Ideas which feel as external laws of nature or archetypal patterns of culture. There is an entire gradient of ideal forces responsible for this depth structure of the collective subconscious. At what point can we say that we have moved from human ideas to more Divine ideas? When we become more conscious of our breathing and convey how to so to someone else, are we now bringing back spirtual knowledge to the masses? It really makes little sense to draw any hard boundary in this area and say "this is still human" and "this is Divine" knowledge. I think it's much more useful to understand everything we perceive in Spirit (thinking) is human knowledge in process of becoming Divine.

SS goes into great detail of the countours of physical-soul-spirit worlds, but always making clear it is One world. Again, monist idealism makes this much easier to comprehend. It is our localized limitations of cognition at any given time which veil the omnipresent higher worlds from our first-person perspective. It is veiled from perception and thought (these are unified polar relation). This is why Cleric keeps discussing the reorientation or inversion of perspective. We could think of it as our road to Damascus moment, when Saul went from persecuting the Church to becoming Paul who was its biggest champion.

It's not that the scriptures suddenly changed in meaning for him, but that his higher consciousness was able to penetrate into its deeper layers. The deeper meaning of natural and cultural phenomena reveals itself as the lens of our perception is cleansed via living thinking. There is little sense to me in wondering about the highest possible understandings of God, the "true meaning of scripture", when our lens is still entirely clouded. I am also coming to learn this in the process of my spiritual growth. In truth, we are not only discovering preexisting higher worlds in living thinking, but also participating in their creation. That is also what the scripture is pointing to. It asks us to become actively involved in manifesting the Word (Logos) within us.


"When I desired to think upon my God, I knew not how to think of Him except as a mass of bodies, for what was not of such a nature seemed to me to be nothing. This was the greatest and almost the only cause of my inevitable error."
- St Augustine, Confessions

[Cleric K]

Is there any sense of the prophet bringing back the Divine truths from the mountain top to the masses?

The reformed Christian speaks of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit which enables them to commune with God and discern the true meaning of scripture.

The Pentecostal has the inner filling of the Holy Spirit which causes them to dance around and fall over under its power. They speak confidently of the nature of God.

The likes of Jonathan Pageau discerns the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world which tell us about God.

David Bentley Hart speaks of the desires in the human soul which can only be satisfied by the boundless richness of a perfect and immediate knowledge of the wellsprings of all Being. One can infer from this the perfections of God.

Frank Turek argues that CRIMES (Causality, Reason, Information, Morality, Evil, Science) can only find their grounding in God and this can tell us about the nature of God.

I offer here this scattered survey of the sort of things the various mountain top visits have returned to us. There are of course many more. Has SS its tablets, carved by the finger of God?

You speak of the reorientation of our thinking in order to experience these thing aright. But perhaps those surveyed above have done that to a degree and are reporting back?? Or is any reporting back confined to mere abstraction given the limitation of language and concepts and should we therefore say, "Yes, that's all very interesting", but ignore and continue to focus on our own transformation?

Anthony, I think you have a deep trauma from your evangelic years I guess you're currently worried that going into SS may turn into just another version of this:





In this sense you're right. Some people call this filling with the Holy Ghost:



Well, this is nothing but spiritual drunkenness. It's not even spiritual in the noble sense because it works in quite base levels in the soul body.

So I get that. I understand that anyone in his right mind, after the initial laughter would find all the above deeply disturbing. Seeing grown people falling victim to such things makes us extremely cautious of anything "spiritual". One feels much more safe sticking to baseline sensory reality.

I know that to this day most people here fail to understand what 'spiritual' in spiritual science signifies. Spiritual is the thinking activity that watches the above videos and worries if that could happen to it. Spiritual is the thinking activity which decides that the sensory perceptions point at something more real than itself. Spiritual is the most immediate knowledge that we exist - irrelevant if it is in a dream or a physical world.

So you say "I'm equally prepared to land before the demands of a supreme intelligence or face the abyss of the void." As far as I understand from what you have said across this forum, this is your main dilemma at this point. You're on the borderline and you equally consider that:
1/ the Cosmos is a dark abyss and lost sparks of thoughts bubble up and coalesce in quasi-stable formations before they sink back into the void
2/ the Cosmos is of Thought-nature, like Goethe's Idea which is inner Light, and our current existence is actually hierarchically filtered Thought-Light. Thus evolution is the experience of the living being, which currently recognizes itself in the filtered light-sparkles (intellectual thoughts), gradually finding its Comic nature within the levels of the Thought-Ocean which thinks the world.

The question is how to choose one without making fools of ourselves and ending up in a video like the above.

Here we should note a tendency in our age which makes us approach a choice like the above in a very specific way. Think of Wall Street. Or even eToro - nowadays everyone can be a trader. We have to choose. Do I buy shares in Meta? Or Tesla? SpaceX? What if Zucky has gone mad with his Metaverse dreams and his company crashes down? Maybe invest in oil? Or speculate on the futures market? Or crypto? What's common between all these? The fact that we don't really care about what we're buying and selling. What matters is to find a market with good liquidity with nice rhythmic patterns such that we can long or short the waves for profit. This is probably the saddest part of today's market thinking. We can even create a futures market for the numbers of deaths in Ukr and as long as the graph is nicely dynamic, many people will trade along the fluctuations. One simply cares for 'buy low, sell high' (or vice versa when shorting). I'm not saying that the markets serve only that purpose but it's a fact that there's quite significant number of traders who simply capitalize on the fluctuations in the price with very little concern about the underlying asset. So there's complete disconnect. We care for the profit while the asset is something there, out there, which simply serves as an occasion for people to gather and play with its price.

Questions like 1/ and 2/ can easily turn into something like this. Anthony, I'm not saying this in any relation to you personally but I just thought it's a good occasion to mention it. So today when people wonder about the different spiritual streams, they see it as not too different than a NASDAQ stock symbol. The basic question is - would I be a fool to invest my time in this or that teaching? What would be my returns if I choose the right thing?

When we seek honestly the answers to the riddle of existence we should overcome the above tendency. All our interest should be not in the stock symbol but in what really the asset is.

In this sense we live in the abstract split-reality if we simply stay on the fence and think if we should buy stocks in 1/ or 2/. Instead, we should simply think livingly where each path leads and see what that means to us.

So this is the basic message. As long as we see things as placing a bet on an abstract theory, we'll always feel floating in the air. It's like speculating if there are 2, 3 or infinite parallel material universes. As with any bet, we may be worried how to choose the winning one. But the nature of these variants is such that it makes absolutely no difference for our practical life, except capitalizing on their price fluctuations.

On the other hand, when we speak of living spiritual life, things have direct practical dimension. In one case someone tells us - you're stuck in this wheelchair for life, just close your eyes, don't think about it and after death all will dissolve as a bad dream. In the other case some tells us - get up and walk. Don't take my word for it - try it for yourself.

But the real question is not which is right and which is wrong but whether we at all want to see ourselves walking. Because once we walk we'll experience freedom as never before but then we'll be treated as healthy person and we'll have to begin to work. While we're in the wheelchair we say "Leave me alone, can't you see I'm disabled?" And there's very peculiar appeal to this situation. Actually it is very tempting to remain disabled and endlessly demand proof if walking is at all possible. One of the greatest catharses we can go through in our materialistic age is to awaken for the person in us who actually prefers to remain disabled.

[Anthony66]

Anthony, I think you have a deep trauma from your evangelic years I guess you're currently worried that going into SS may turn into just another version of this:

Indeed there is great trauma departing from evangelicalism. There are many podcasts and ministries devoted to helping people who often suffer significant psychological scarring from leaving the fold.

You're on the borderline and you equally consider that:
1/ the Cosmos is a dark abyss and lost sparks of thoughts bubble up and coalesce in quasi-stable formations before they sink back into the void
2/ the Cosmos is of Thought-nature, like Goethe's Idea which is inner Light, and our current existence is actually hierarchically filtered Thought-Light. Thus evolution is the experience of the living being, which currently recognizes itself in the filtered light-sparkles (intellectual thoughts), gradually finding its Comic nature within the levels of the Thought-Ocean which thinks the world.

The structure of "2" is what concerns me here. Our present state of conscious evolution means there is a veiled reality to which we can only speculate about without a re-configuring of our soul. But my observation of the movement of thought throughout history is that we have moved from a picture of a world governed by a scattered array of spiritual forces, gods, and other entities bustling about, all competing for influence. Rather, the best of philosophy has arrived at classical theism - where the world is ordered by the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. I might be totally misunderstanding things but SS seems to lead to a retrograde movement.

But the real question is not which is right and which is wrong but whether we at all want to see ourselves walking. Because once we walk we'll experience freedom as never before but then we'll be treated as healthy person and we'll have to begin to work.

Is this not akin to the hope offered by offered by numerous oddball belief systems, e.g. Scientology?

[lorenzop]

or 3/: Reality is made of a single 'substance', and, is neither veiled nor out to get us. However we do not know and can never know what that substance is because it has no name.