(Short) In Remembrance of the Matrix

[Cleric K]

Of course we are talking about metaphysical beliefs, be it materialism, idealism, universal nonduality of awareness, or your beliefs in the Sun Man, higher order beings and hierarchical ideal structure of the universe. It would be silly to deny it. I haven't met a single person who would not have some sort of metaphysical beliefs, but most people simply do not recognize and do not admit them as beliefs.

So the only certain thing is our thinking which recognizes the given. Other things are only floating thoughts - metaphysical beliefs. The whole goal of everything that is here written is to show how we can trace the thinking process towards its foundations. Not by speculating about it through more abstract thinking but by liberating the spiritual cognitive forces concealed within ordinary thoughts.

I'm not talking about the hierarchies and the Sun Man in the latest essays and here. It's all about the Central Topic and the possibility for spiritual activity to awaken at a more fundamental level. This can be followed by anyone who has the good will to do so. The goal is not to make people believe in these things but to see how they are completely attainable by understanding the essential nature of the path. We need nothing but sound thinking for this understanding. Several people here, even though they are not willing to walk the path, have at least recognized the reality of the direction.

To all this you basically say that you don't strictly deny the reality of this path but in your view it is optional and leads to experiences entirely within the layers of the Matrix. As said, I don't mind that you are opposed to this path of experience. But let it at least be clear that you dismiss that path based on your own metaphysical belief which if true, would make things exactly as you say - the whole evolution of cognition in the last three millennia has been simply an interesting but entirely optional exploration, because the Earthly consciousness can never be bridged with the higher anyway.

Well, I'm not comfortable with any position which builds upon a unverifiable belief (or verifiable only after death). I'm not comfortable with dismissing a path leading to actual deep self- and world-knowledge on the grounds that the thinking ego from the beginning postulates (metaphysically believes) that path to lead only to a self-enclosed domain of reality.

So let me repeat. The whole path of spiritual development is not in itself based on metaphysical belief. It is entirely a path of expansion of direct experience. To put a ceiling to where this path can lead can only be done through postulating a metaphysical ceiling. So if that ceiling gives you comfort and allows you to support you belief about what is above the ceiling - I'm fine with this. But please try to understand that following the path of development is really about following the given to its ultimate conclusions and not about postulating metaphysical systems.

[Eugene I.]

So let me repeat. The whole path of spiritual development is not in itself based on metaphysical belief. It is entirely a path of expansion of direct experience. To put a ceiling to where this path can lead can only be done through postulating a metaphysical ceiling. So if that ceiling gives you comfort and allows you to support you belief about what is above the ceiling - I'm fine with this. But please try to understand that following the path of development is really about following the given to its ultimate conclusions and not about postulating metaphysical systems.

So you think that your view of thinking existing beyond the physical death is not a metaphysical belief?

Our own thinking itself and its activity (abilities to experience, will, think, perceive, imagine and feel) is in fact a given reality, no question about that. The real problem is that thinking has enormous imagination powers to imagine whatever it wants, and then to fool itself into accepting its own imaginations as part of the given reality. With your concentrated and developed intuitive imagination you can imagine higher levels and higher beings and zodiacs and Sun Man and then make yourself believe that your imaginations are indeed perceptions of an actual objective reality and an ultimate conclusion of the expansion of your thinking, without realizing that all you are doing is expanding your own thinking into its own imaginations. This is how we create our beliefs without realizing that they are beliefs. Most people have problem discriminating between the given reality and the products of their imaginations and interpretations of reality. And usually, as a consequence, they consider their view of reality as a given, and other peoples views as beliefs (that's what you do as well). And it is indeed very confusing, and recognizing our own beliefs are indeed not easy to do, because we all have cognitive biases, be believe in what we unconsciously want to believe in, or fear not to believe in.

I don't see any problem with having beliefs, all people have beliefs. Even the assumption that other people are conscious is a metaphysical belief, so when you write "we must..." you are already assuming a belief. But there is a difference between having beliefs in an honest way (by admitting them as beliefs) and dishonest way (by lying to ourselves and others that our views are how reality actually is rather than what we believe about how it is).

So, the reality of the existence of thinking activity (the Central Topic) is unquestionable. But then you do a trick and say: "aha, so now apply the high imaginative and intuitive ability of thinking and you will experience and perceive into the depths of the meanings that are experienced by thinking", and that is where you cross the line between the given and the imagined/believed. You smuggle the content of thinking (its imaginations and ideas) as if it is an objective reality under the hood of the given fact of the existence and the activity of thinking.

[Cleric K]

So you think that your view of thinking existing beyond the physical death is not a metaphysical belief?

Our own thinking itself and its activity (abilities to experience, will, think, perceive, imagine and feel) is in fact a given reality, no question about that. The real problem is that thinking has enormous imagination powers to imagine whatever it wants, and then to fool itself into accepting its own imaginations as part of the given reality. With your concentrated and developed intuitive imagination you can imagine higher levels and higher beings and zodiacs and Sun Man and then make yourself believe that your imaginations are indeed perceptions of an actual objective reality and an ultimate conclusion of the expansion of your thinking, without realizing that all you are doing is expanding your own thinking into its own imaginations. This is how we create our beliefs without realizing that they are beliefs. Most people have problem discriminating between the given reality and the products of their imaginations and interpretations of reality. And usually, as a consequence, they consider their view of reality as a given, and other peoples views as beliefs (that's what you do as well). And it is indeed very confusing, and recognizing our own beliefs are indeed not easy to do, because we all have cognitive biases, be believe in what we unconsciously want to believe in, or fear not to believe in.

I don't see any problem with having beliefs, all people have beliefs. Even the assumption that other people are conscious is a metaphysical belief, so when you write "we must..." you are already assuming a belief. But there is a difference between having beliefs in an honest way (by admitting them as beliefs) and dishonest way (by lying to ourselves and others that our views are how reality actually is rather than what we believe about how it is).

I can say here many interesting things about these beliefs, about proofs, certainty and so on but it all will most certainly simply lead the conversation astray instead of clarifying it.

I understand your pessimism but it should be acknowledged that the idea that our consciousness is cut clean from its foundations is still a belief. It is a belief that whatever we do here on Earth, we're guaranteed to succumb to our own fantasies. In other words, the belief is that it is impossible that through evolutionary/spiritual development the chasm can be bridged. The intellectual ego recognizes the certainty of existence of its thoughts but considers itself as unquestionable authority. This causes the ego to imagine any kind of phenomena simply as debris within consciousness. Practically the ego thinks: "No matter what enters the field of my consciousness, I'll by the top authority. As such, all phenomena are equal before me. If I treat some of them differently it is only because I have idolized them and no longer recognize I'm holding them on a pedestal through metaphysical belief." And that's fine. But what the thinking ego doesn't even allow itself to consider is that there might be such states of consciousness where the thinking ego itself is spread before a higher level of being and this is experienced with the same certainty as the fact that our thoughts exist.

So there's metaphysical belief, or rather - a disbelief - that there could be such states of existence which give another, higher order certainty which the thinking ego can't even grasp as long as it jumps along its intellectual thoughts.

And note that the situation is not symmetric. It would be symmetric if one camp disbelieves it while the other believes it, yet both stay where they are. The asymmetry manifests because the second camp doesn't need to remain with a believing intellectual ego but can simply move forwards and verify things. Of course, the first camp will still reject everything, it will say that the higher certainty is an illusion. Well, at this point the dialog simply ceases. I've mentioned this before. This asymmetry manifests in the whole way the old must reject the new.

Cognitive evolution doesn't go forward by rejecting the old. It's quite the opposite - it fully understands it, extract its essence and moves forward. The opposite is not true. The old can't support itself by understanding the new. It can only do that by placing a boundary, by rejecting the new as something incomplete, optional or even downright illusionary. This is the great difference. And anyone here can confirm this if they are honest. No one rejects the ideas of higher development because they have explored them, understood them and found them to be erroneous. Instead, all effort is put in rejecting the new from as far distance as possible without getting too close.

So let all that stay as an open door. Maybe God is not so cruel that he created humans in such a way that they can only play roulette and pick a random religion. Maybe he has given humans all the means to know the Truth of their own structure and the structure of the Cosmos. It's enough to be open for that possibility. Dismissing this possibility is in no way something we can do with absolute certainty. It's still a belief that we're created in such a way that it's impossible to know Truth reliably while on Earth. It may look as we're being humble in this way, that we're sober, unbiased and so on, but in reality we simply dismiss a very real path of experience just because we believe that it can lead to nothing but illusions. It's OK to be skeptical, even pessimistic but we shouldn't forget that there's nothing in the given which right from the start guarantees that the path of knowledge can never lead to anything more than illusions. This is how we like to see things because of the specific constellation of our sympathies and antipathies but it is in no way a certain fact of the given.

[Eugene I.]

PS: but then if you would accept all ideas and imaginations as truths then you would obviously run into a problem (because the ideas "the Sun Man exists" and "the Sun Man does not exist" would have both to be equally true). So then you claim that some meanings/ideas belong to the absolute Idea ("time domain") and others belong to the abstractions of our individuated thinking activities ("fourier domain"). The problem is how to distinguish between them, how to verify that what you claim to be the true Idea indeed has any relevance to the truth and reality and not just a byproduct of your imagination. The only criterium of verification I saw in your posts is the "higher cognition and Reason". This is a trick medieval theologists tried to prove the existence of God by logical reasoning, and they failed miserably. Now you are trying to do the same thing again and claim the "Reason and higher thinking" to be the ultimate means to verify the truthfulness of your views. The difference here is that the medieval theologists were applying the common human logic, but you are appealing to the "higher cognition and Reason", so if anyone disagrees with you and says "I applied the reason, intuition and cognition and came to different conclusions" you say "that is because you applied your limited human reason and I applied the absolute higher Reason which you have no accesses to yet", and that's an obvious catch-22. So, there is no problem in believing in God or Sun Man as long as it is done in an honest way and assumed as a belief. But claiming any beliefs to be absolute truths by appealing to "higher cognition and Reason" is simply cheating, and that is what I cannot accept in anthroposophy.

[AshvinP]

PS: but then if you would accept all ideas and imaginations as truths then you would obviously run into a problem (because the ideas "the Sun Man exists" and "the Sun Man does not exist" would have both to be equally true). So then you claim that some meanings/ideas belong to the absolute Idea ("time domain") and others belong to the abstractions of our individuated thinking activities ("fourier domain"). The problem is how to distinguish between them, how to verify that what you claim to be the true Idea indeed has any relevance to the truth and reality and not just a byproduct of your imagination. The only criterium of verification I saw in your posts is the "higher cognition and Reason". This is a trick medieval theologists tried to prove the existence of God by logical reasoning, and they failed miserably. Now you are trying to do the same thing again and claim the "Reason and higher thinking" to be the ultimate means to verify the truthfulness of your views. The difference here is that the medieval theologists were applying the common human logic, but you are appealing to the "higher cognition and Reason", so if anyone disagrees with you and says "I applied the reason, intuition and cognition and came to different conclusions" you say "that is because you applied your limited human reason and I applied the absolute higher Reason which you have no accesses to yet", and that's an obvious catch-22. So, there is no problem in believing in God or Sun Man as long as it is done in an honest way and assumed as a belief. But claiming any beliefs to be absolute truths by appealing to "higher cognition and Reason" is simply cheating, and that is what I cannot accept in anthroposophy.

What is "cheating" if someone explains clearly how you can develop living Reason and higher cognition, in practically new and interesting ways every other day, and you refuse to do it out of sheer spite for Christian spirituality? You have not even attempted the exercises suggested by Cleric. You cannot explain why the logic of cognitive evolution is wrong, why abstract intellect is max cognitive capacity, why Cleric's meditative approach is flawed, why perception of astral or etheric worlds must be pure fantasy, why there is an impenetrable veil at the threshold of bodily death, and many other related things. You haven't presented a single argument in almost one year. In fact, you have actively acknowledged that all these things are correct and possible when pressed by us to do so, but then fall back on, "but who knows which people are seeing true imaginations or which are seeing their own fantasy?" That, of course, comes from your own inability to trust logical reasoning, even though you do it every day at your job and when encountering the world content. Even though your very life depends on it.

For those following who still aren't sure where thinking fits in, consider musical harmony and consonance. What is it that makes some progression of notes sound harmonious and consonant, while another will sound disharmonious and dissonant? The propositional and prosaic thinkers will have no explanation (and we are all prosaic thinkers at most times of our day), or they will mistake the fact that musical phenomena correlate with some brain activity or other material phenomena for causation. More living Reason, on the other hand, can help us perceive how what we call "musical harmony" is a dim reflection of higher order logic, as Cleric has explained before. It is a reflection of spiritual activity in realms where 'music' is actually meaningful speech. The psychological phenomenon of "cognitive dissonance" is no coincidence - what our Thinking is always seeking out is a harmony of the facts and constellations of facts it beholds. All knowing inquiries presuppose this truth about Thinking, but most people don't realize it because they keep it in the blind spot. Instead they postulate a view from nowhere in which only the propositions they want to be objectively true are true, and everything else is "subjective fantasy".

[Eugene I.]

It is a belief that whatever we do here on Earth, we're guaranteed to succumb to our own fantasies.

So there's metaphysical belief, or rather - a disbelief - that there could be such states of existence which give another, higher order certainty which the thinking ego can't even grasp as long as it jumps along its intellectual thoughts.

Yes, it is a belief that whatever we do here on Earth, we're guaranteed to succumb to our own fantasies.
But it is equally a belief that by applying our cognition we can arrive with certainty at the absolute higher order truth (and even the existence of such higher order truth is a belief). The reality of our human condition is that we simply do not know anything with certainty (other than the existence of our own thinking). But that's too much of a brutal fact to accept for most people, they want to know something with certainty beyond their own human thinking, so they invent belief systems and take them as truths (not as beliefs). But again, I have no problem with accepting beliefs, as long as we do it in an honest way.

The asymmetry manifests because the second camp doesn't need to remain with a believing intellectual ego but can simply move forwards and verify things. Of course, the first camp will still reject everything, it will say that the higher certainty is an illusion. Well, at this point the dialog simply ceases. I've mentioned this before. This asymmetry manifests in the whole way the old must reject the new.

The first camp would not reject anything, it would only take beliefs for what they are: as beliefs. The real asymmetry here is that the second camp would claim its beliefs and imaginations to be the truth. Such claim is supported by applying a circular argument that such truth is confirmed by "Reason" (with "Reason" being nothing else than another set of beliefs). So, it is in fact only beliefs confirming beliefs, but it is claimed to be the Truth confirmed by Reason. And declaring the position of the first camp as "ego" is another way of cheating (as I told you many times before), because I can equally claim that your way of thinking is an expression of your own ego (but I would not do that)

Cognitive evolution doesn't go forward by rejecting the old. It's quite the opposite - it fully understands it, extract its essence and moves forward. The opposite is not true. The old can't support itself by understanding the new. It can only do that by placing a boundary, by rejecting the new as something incomplete, optional or even downright illusionary. This is the great difference. And anyone here can confirm this if they are honest. No one rejects the ideas of higher development because they have explored them, understood them and found them to be erroneous. Instead, all effort is put in rejecting the new from as far distance as possible without getting too close.

It is ironic that the nondual approach to the spiritual development is also a path of experiential higher cognition beyond the human limitation and its ego, but it is the path different from yours. And because it is different, you deny it, because you can only accept your version of truth.

For me my nondual path is a belief, I admit that. It is confirmed with my spiritual experience, but I cannot claim with absolute certainty that my nondual experience bears any absolute truth beyond my current human condition, I can only believe in it, and I do, but I believe in it in honest way. I can only hope that it turns out to be true after I cross the death line, and this hope keeps me going along the path.

So let all that stay as an open door. Maybe God is not so cruel that he created humans in such a way that they can only play roulette and pick a random religion. Maybe he has given humans all the means to know the Truth of their own structure and the structure of the Cosmos. It's enough to be open for that possibility. Dismissing this possibility is in no way something we can do with absolute certainty. It's still a belief that we're created in such a way that it's impossible to know Truth reliably while on Earth. It may look as we're being humble in this way, that we're sober, unbiased and so on, but in reality we simply dismiss a very real path of experience just because we believe that it can lead to nothing but illusions. It's OK to be skeptical, even pessimistic but we shouldn't forget that there's nothing in the given which right from the start guarantees that the path of knowledge can never lead to anything more than illusions. This is how we like to see things because of the specific constellation of our sympathies and antipathies but it is in no way a certain fact of the given.

I have no problem accepting the belief that it is possible to know the Truth, and to know it experientially (even though it is still a belief). The problem is that we have many versions of such truths and many spiritual experiences, but your claim is not that it is just possible to know the Truth, but that it is only possible by applying your way of knowing it and that the Truth that you arrive at is indeed the ultimate Truth, and all the truths that other people arrived at by applying their ways to approach the truths are only their own abstractions or at best distortions of the Truth known to you because their ways of knowing the truth are the results of the activity of their egoic human minds. It is again cheating: accepting that we can know the truth does not automatically mean that the truth that you arrive at is the ultimate Truth, but you are trying to smuggle your own version of truth (or the version of your group) together with the belief that we can know the Truth.

If you would only say that you have your own way of cognizing the reality and you have your own set of beliefs about what the truth is, I would never ague with it. Indeed there is a lot of useful practices and insights in Steiner's philosophy and esoteric teachings, and I'm very open to learn about them. But the problem is that you claim it to be the only true approach to the Truth that opened to you the access to the knowledge of the Absolute Truth, while all other approaches (philosophical, scientific, religious, spiritual) are only abstractions, distortions and expressions of the human egoic activity.

We actually repeated these arguments so many times before that there is not much point in continuing here, we are simply going in circles.

[Eugene I.]

PS: I'm not a Christian but I really respect their position in that respect. Christians (at least their educated theologists) do not claim that they know the Truth with undeniable certainty. They only say that the Divine can be approached through faith. As they say in the Nicean Creed, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty". Definitely faith is something more deep and profound than simply a system of beliefs, yet it is still faith, not knowledge with certainty. And by having this kind of faith in God they remain honest to themselves and others. Buddhists and many other nondualists have a similar approach.

[AshvinP]

PS: I'm not a Christian but I really respect their position in that respect. Christians (at least their educated theologists) do not claim that they know the Truth with undeniable certainty. They only say that the Divine can be approached through faith. As they say in the Nicean Creed, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty". Definitely faith is something more deep and profound than simply a system of beliefs, yet it is still faith, not knowledge with certainty. And by having this kind of faith in God they remain honest to themselves and others. Buddhists and many other nondualists have a similar approach.

Eugene,

Who mentioned Steiner or Anthroposophy on this thread? Was Cleric making arguments for spiritual scientific claims in The Central Topic threads? Did I make any of those claims here, or in my last several short essays? I have only quoted Christian scripture, which apparently you claim to respect.

Anyone reading impartially can tell the answer to the above questions is "no". Yet you are only commenting on these threads, bringing up Steiner when no one else has. You don't start your own threads to discuss your spiritual beliefs. We wouldn't come onto your threads to attack nondual mystical approach. Why do you feel so compelled to participate in these threads and put down our spirituality when we aren't even mentioning it here? Why don't you address any of the specific points made in our essays or posts? Is this reaction by you not dogmatic and exclusionary?

As for faith, in the sense of "I can only approach the Divine by faith", that is indeed at the heart of many of these debates. It is a refusal to look at metamorphoses of Spirit, cognitive evolution, in any serious or practically applicable light. This spiritual evolutionary process is not at all something postulated by Steiner alone. It has led many great idealist thinkers to the conclusion that blind faith, mere belief, is not the appropriate mindset for current humanity in its awakening through the physical into the spiritual. What is needed now is an impulse towards concrete and specified inner knowledge of what was previously only known by way of revelation, tradition, customs, moral authorities, etc.

God is the absolute harmony of necessity and freedom, and this harmony cannot be revealed in individual destinies but only in history as a whole; consequently, only history as a whole is a revelation of God—and then only a progressively evolving revelation [. . .]. History is an epic composed in the mind of God. It has two main parts: one depicting mankind’s egress from its center to its farthest point of displacement; the other, its return. The former is, as it were, history’s Iliad; the latter, its Odyssey. In the one, the direction is centrifugal; in the other, it becomes centripetal. In this way, the great purpose of the phenomenal world reveals itself in history.

[Cleric K]

We actually repeated these arguments so many times before that there is not much point in continuing here, we are simply going in circles.

Indeed we're going in circles.

It's simple. The nature of the intellect is such that for any statement we can form its negation.

You say how the talks about consciousness beyond death are just another belief. First we must be clear that seen in this way, everything is belief. It's a belief that I'll witness existence few seconds from now. Maybe the Universe will suddenly end before that, who knows? The only certain things seem to be the immediate perceptions and thoughts. The fault is not in the essential nature of thinking. It is our fault that we invest purposes in the intellect which the given doesn't suggest. It's like saying "no matter how I combine colors, this can never give me certainty for the existence of sound. Thus we can never know anything with certainty." But how did we decide that the everything must be derivable from color? We can ask the same question about the intellect - at what point we decided that reality must be derivable from intellectual thoughts? It's really an elementary error but at scale of human evolution, it takes centuries before such errors are rectified. Many human destinies go entirely under the spell of such errors.

So when one says "I dismiss anything which can't be known as certainty by the intellect", we're implicitly declaring the rules of a game of which the given doesn't at all speak. We chose the game, we saw that it leads nowhere and then declare reality to be unknowable simply because it can't be derived from the rules of our own game.

So it is true - even when we attain to higher cognition and can see in full reality how our Earthly consciousness forms, once we begin to think about everything with our intellect, nothing can stop us from forming the intellectual negation of everything experienced. It is simply a natural degree of thinking freedom. As a matter of fact, if we stumble upon a statements that we believe can't be negated, it simply means that we've lost a degree of freedom of our spiritual activity.

From this point onwards things are as Ashvin already wrote above. Practically no one lives their life based on some intellectual certainty. There's simply no such thing. We can't even step outside our home if we were to demand proof that there really exists a place to step out into. Indeed, there's nothing which can prevent me to cast doubt whether the world outside my house exists. It's a simple degree of freedom (negating/doubting) that I can exploit with my intellect. I can formulate the negation of the world outside my home. Then if I'm ill intended, I can demand proof that the world exists so that I won't be wasting my energy to go all the way to the front door in vain.

Even in most elementary life we're dealing always with the harmony of the facts. These facts are not derivable from some abstract concepts. We must continually expand the sphere of our experience and find the thoughts which reflect the harmony of the facts.

So the problem is not that there's no formal proof of spiritual things. There's no formal proof of anything. In fact, the only things that we know with complete certainty (like the existence of our thoughts) are known without any need of logical reasoning. They are direct intuition, the implicit meaningful dimension of consciousness. So let's be clear that this proof/belief thing is simply a form of abuse. It's like inventing rules of a game and then, since the world can't be derived from that game, we declare that no one knows anything and we can do whatever we want because there's no right or wrong. In other words, we put forward an impossible task and since no one (including us) can solve it, we use it as an excuse to pick a belief of our own liking. This position ignores the fact that phenomena can be followed in their holistic harmony. Even though none of the phenomena in isolation gives us certainty about the whole picture, nevertheless all facts taken together form a coherent whole. It's the same with the talks about the life beyond death. If we take the higher experiences in the astral spectrum in isolation, we can always negate them in the intellect. Nothing can prevent us from doing so. It's the birthright of the intellect to be able to formulate both the positive and the negative sides of a statement. This doesn't in the least mean that reality is unknowable. No one has ever given us a promise that we'll find 'proof' of the nature of reality within a handful of abstract thoughts. We should simply do the same thing we do in every realm of practical life - trace how isolated facts work together in a harmony.

To illustrate this, we can imagine how anyone listening to Columbus speaking of America, could negate it. They can say that he simply lies or that he has entered hallucinogenic mists and has only dreamt about America and so on. Then even if we're forced to see it with our own eyes we can still doubt it. We can say that we've been secretly intoxicated with hallucinogens and what we see is being suggested to us. It doesn't matter how absurd these denials can be. The thing is that there's nothing which in principle can prevent the intellect from formulating the negations.

The question is why the intellect wants to do that? The answer is always hidden in secret sympathies and antipathies. There's something which clashes deeply with particular interests. If the intellect was disinterested it would simply follow the harmony of the facts and see what they speak out of themselves.

[Eugene I.]

OK, Cleric, so we now agree that all our views (except for the basic facts of the existence of our thinking activity and its phenomena) are only beliefs. The question now is: how do we assess the truthfulness of these beliefs? How do we know and verify if our beliefs or views about reality indeed have any relevance to it and not our mere imaginations? You seem to suggest to "find the thoughts which reflect the harmony of the facts", but that seems to me a very vague criterium prone to cognitive and subjective biases. This is the major problem of epistemology (not only in philosophical or scientific sense but in spiritual sense too). Science developed its own criteria, philosophy has somewhat different and more vague criteria (depending on the branch), but in spiritual domain these criteria are even more vague and subjectively-biased. But that belongs to a different subject and more relevant to this thread.