Anthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 24, 2023 11:02 amAshvin,AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 1:13 am So we need to find where God lives in our experience - in what activity does He come to expression? One could label this activity many things - in our activity of love, conscience, devotion, hope, upward striving, etc. But to express it in a way that encompasses all those, we could call it thoughtful 'attention'. When we pay attention to something, like the white clouds in the sky, we can't simultaneously observe the activity by which we are paying attention to those clouds. But that is precisely the activity where God lives, the temple into which he incarnates. God is the force by which we pay attention and bring the World of appearances into manifestation.
I'm still captivated by the bolded text. At first blush and to most theists in the Western traditions this sounds quite heretical. God is a transcendent being, the maximally great being, a being who exists apart from his creation, the one who sits on the other side of the heavenly/earthly divide. How do we reconcile with God existing in the immanence of our thinking activity? The answer I guess lies in our failure to understand our thinking activity as being a convoluted expression of universal Thinking. It is through ascending to higher cognition that we "draw near to God". How would you put it?
Anthony,
Yes, the answer lies in our experience of the whole world as the expression of concentric layers Cosmic Thinking in which our own thinking is the most convoluted expression, yet also the most transparent to us from our current perspective. Before we make a lot of progress towards higher cognition, however, there are many ways to conceptually probe this reality. One way is the philosophical approach that we find in PoF which Scott is in the process of condensing. Since it is a phenomenology of cognition, it has the advantage of leading us to an objective experience of our own thinking activity. Other forms of idealist philosophy used to be a good entry to understanding the World as Thinking activity, as one would expect, but we have seen on this forum that practically idealism has become another form of materialism insofar as intention is abstracted out of the World manifestations. The other problem is that, even if intention is acknowledged behind the 'Plan', it is understood in the most abstract way, i.e. without concrete application to the course of history, science, human culture in general, and the course of our own daily lives.
Another approach to make the intentional ideational nature of the World more concrete is what I mentioned to Lorenzo on the other thread. We can try our best to pay attention and discern how much of our experience is actually woven from intentional thinking activity.
The main problem is, to begin with, we have stopped paying attention to the course of our own lives and how our decisions influence our states of being over various time frames. That is what our ideational capacity allows us to do - and it is presupposed in all domains of therapeutic significance such as nutritional science, psychology, stress management, and all similar fields - but the average person simply doesn't take advantage of this attentional capacity in any holistic way. We rely on the piecemeal research of other people and fail to lay hold of our own inner creative potential. If we start paying more attention to various daily decisions like what we eat, how much eat, when we eat, what we do before sleeping, what we do when awakening, what we expose ourselves to, how much screen time we have, what patterns of thinking and feeling and desiring that we indulge in, how we interact with other people in speech and deed, and a million other such factors, then we have the basis to start discerning patterns that are relevant to our states of being. Our intuitive organism is highly sensitive to these patterns if we give it the proper 'dataset' to work with. We will notice that many states of being throughout our day that we previously felt were determined by nature or random bad luck - up to and including states of physical illness - are actually directly related to our own intentions and manifestations of those intentions. Again, none of this requires heightened cognitive capacities to begin with, as Federica also said above, although the development of such capacities will awaken us even further to these rhythmic patterns that are always there.
When we speak of the 'rhythms' of the Cosmos, of the Earth's seasons and the plant kingdom, of the migrations in the animal kingdom, of human culture in the domains of economics, politics, science, and so forth, these are all pointing us towards the patterns of ideational activity at various scales of existence. When we learn to heighten our intuitive resonance with the ideational patterns in our own life, through our attentional capacity, we will naturally start to discern them clearly in the outspread World around us as well.
This approach requires persistent effort since we need to discern patterns over somewhat large frames of time, at least relative to our normal attention span of a few minutes. The ideational activity is somewhat obvious when we look around at the roads, buildings, vehicles, technological devices, and so forth which populate our environment, although it still helps to remind ourselves that as we go about the day. We can also discern it in Nature to the extent that human activity has modified the natural landscape around us. But it becomes most intimate when we discern the role of ideational activity in the patterns of our own states of being, which are always oscillating in rhythmic ways. We could start with the rhythm of waking and sleeping, noticing our moods and thinking patterns in the morning and evening, and then try to narrow towards the middle of the day, so to speak, to discern nested patterns within that rhythm. We need to trace how everything relates to intentional decisions that we have made during that day or previous days. They could be intentional thoughts, feelings, and acts we have already engaged in or that we are planning to engage in.
We can also notice how thinking, among all our other activities, has the most religious quality to it, at least if we are serious thinkers who are interested in reaching the truth of matters. Even secular scientific thinking reveals this quality insofar as it is a continual act of probing the mysteries of existence without passion or prejudice as to what 'should' be found as a result. In religious terms, the Divine has always been a force that requires us to admit a certain helplessness in our powers of understanding, vision, and conception. "You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live." The serious scientific thinker must adopt a certain mood of devotion and humility in the face of the natural world and its secrets. Unlike our acts of will and our moods of feeling that arrived to us as something quite finished, as 'ends-in-themselves', our thinking activity must continually work for new insights by precipitating conceptual forms from experiences-observations and stringing these forms together to reach overarching principles. Its work is never done. That already speaks to us of how the Divine works in the World by manifesting a diversity of forms that interact with each other to accomplish overarching goals for the benefit of all, reaching ever-higher stages of perfection.