The Truth Perspective: Atheism vs. Religion: Is God a Cosmic King, Or Criminal? - Part 2

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Sat, 09 Jun 2018 16:00 UTC

In Part 2 of our discussion on religion, God and atheism, we dive deeper in why belief in God might be rational - contrary to what atheists believe. But there are many conceptions of God, some more rational than others. Traditional monotheism - taken literally - can't withstand the assault of its critics. The atheists have that going for them. But a naturalistic theism arguably can. And the atheists don't have anything to say about that. In fact, there are some things that probably cannot be accounted for without some sort of divinity: truth, values, even math.

Tune in Saturday, 12:00 pm EDT, as we begin to flesh out what a naturalistic God might be like.

Running Time: 01:26:46

Download: MP3

Here's the transcript of the show:

Harrison: Welcome back to The Truth Perspective everyone, as usual I'm Harrison Koehli and with me is Corey Schenk.

Corey: Hello.

Harrison: And today we're going to be continuing with the conversation from last week on god, religion and universe. Last week we looked at a few topics, one of which was the philosopher Robin Collingwood's ideas about religion and art, and specifically his idea of a religious consciousness which grasps the truth through religious imagery or symbols and that the root of that imagery is in imagination, and by extension we added religious experience, basically, as a way of trying to explain why we're religious. Of course, there are a lot of valid ways of looking at why we're religious. We're just commenting on a couple of them but there are all kinds of ideas that we could get into but we're not going to. For the purposes of our discussion, we're going to focus on these ones.

So one thing that we didn't get into last week in regard to Collingwood's idea is to take a deeper look into this idea of religious experience, because the way Collingwood looks at it's almost as if he kind of writes off the imagery as nothing but imagery, nothing but imagination. The implication being it's purely imaginary, almost like a total fiction. But, when we add in the dimension of religious experience, we can ask is there is even a reality to some of those some of those objects of imagination, some of those imaginary creations. Is there some reality behind either the experience, or some of what shape those experiences take.

So we're going to start with that and see where the discussion takes us from there, with the hope eventually of getting to this alternative idea that plays against the idea that we brought up last week about god being the Cosmic Criminal, as a being that not only breaks the laws of causality but also is a pretty nasty guy because of the problem of evil, a recurring problem in theology. To start out with, let's go into this religious experience. Corey I believe you have a quote from William James. Let's hear that one.

Corey: Yeah, I've got a quote from his book Varieties of Religious Experience on page 54. He had a variety of different testimonies from individuals and how their religious experiences had shaped their lives. On page 54 it reads:

I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop, where my soul opened out as it were, into the infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep. The deep that my own struggle had opened up within being, answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars, I stood alone with him who had made me, and all the beauty and love and sorrow and even temptation. I did not seek him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with his. The ordinary sense of things around me faded. For the moment, nothing but an ineffable joy and exultation remained. There was, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude conception of god had, as it were, burst into flower. Since that time no discussion that I have heard about the proof of god's existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of god's spirit, I have never lost it again. I'm aware that it may be justly called mystical. I'm not enough acquainted with philosophy to defend it from that, or any other charge. I feel that in writing of it, I have overlaid it in words, rather than put it very clearly to your thought. But, such as it is, I have described it as carefully as I am now am able to do.

Harrison: Well, before we comment on that one, I want to read from a page in Collingwood's book Speculum Mentis, that kind of goes along with that quote, but also kind of contrasts with it a bit. So, he starts:

The assumption that god is a concept, an object of thought, the ultimate reality of philosophical analysis.

The assumption is based on some of the things that he wrote. But he continues,

Now, is this identification of god with the Absolute legitimate? All theology assumes that it is, but it cannot be. God is the holy one, the worshiped, the object of faith. The absolute is reality. the demonstrated, the object of reason. No one can worship the Absolute and no one can prove the existence of god. It is true that many have tried to do both these things, but they have uniformly failed. The proofs of the existence of god form a long and glorious chapter in the history of human thought, but they have always ended by proving something that is not the existence of god.

The attempt to worship the Absolute has been a not uninteresting chapter in the history of religion, and it has always ended in the worship of something that is not the Absolute. The simple religious consciousness is here our best guide. It knows that god is revealed not to the intellect, but to the heart, which means not the practical reason or the emotional faculty, but simply the religious consciousness. God is not known, he is adored. We cannot think him, we can only love and fear him. The simple religious consciousness knows that when philosophers call their ultimate reality by the name of god, they are taking that name in vain, and pretending to be what they are not. They are in fact, as insincere as is a religion which talks of the supreme being. God and the absolute are not identical, but irretrievable distinct, and yet their identical in this sense. God is the imaginative or intuitive form by which the Absolute reveals itself to the religious consciousness.

So, I think we had an example from James' book. First of all is this James or is it just a guy that he's quoting? This guy is describing this ineffable experience. He even says that putting it into words cheapens it. It takes something out of it. There's no way that he can convey that experience through words. Even his previous notions of god were just filler, they were thought, they didn't become real until he had this experience.

So this was what Collingwood's saying. This is a direct speaking to the religious consciousness, it's a connection with or a grasp of the religious consciousness experiencing this thing, like god. I think Collingwood point is that there are two modes of human experience. There are more than two, but he's focusing on two. There's the religious experience of god. When we're speaking of god, we're speaking in a dimension of human experience that is based in this feeling, this very root, basic level of direct experience. When we're talking about god as this supreme being, the ultimate, we're approaching a level of philosophical analysis where we're talking about these things as concepts and ideas that we can understand and comprehend, but they are two different faculties. They are two different ways of knowing something.

To just expand on this guy's experience that he gave, the one you read, Corey, there's actually been a lot of research done on it, but it's not very popularized, or well known. I recently read a book called Paul in Ecstasy, and it's about the presence of religious experience in early Christianity, specifically in the letters of Paul by Colleen Shantz. A lot of the book is just psychological information, tests and experiments that have been done on people about their religious experiences, and they're called altered states of consciousness in the literature.

There are all kinds of different altered states of consciousness. I didn't know how in-depth these things have been studied. They've done tests on which parts of the brain are active in certain different experiences. They've done all kinds of social analysis, such as in which kinds of societies certain religious experiences are more prevalent, in what classes. You'll find that some religious experiences are more prevalent in more so-called oppressed or low-class environment, and some are more prevalent in a higher class, or just based on the social organization. So, you'll have glossolalia, which is speaking in tongues, if I remember correctly. It's more predominant in loosely organized settings. But when you have a more hierarchical structure, you don't see that so much. I can't remember the exact details. That's a book that I want to return to, in the coming months. Some time we'll get into that.

One of the religious experiences that is in the literature is, I believe they call it the Absolute Unified Being. This is an experience I'd say is one that that guy described in that quote. It's this very clear encounter with what is felt as and experienced as an Absolute being that is encompassing the entire creation, basically god. Last week we were talking about why people have historically come up with these ideas of encountering different beings, angels and demons. Well, it's quite obvious that in certain altered states of consciousness, there are experiences in which people encounter these beings exactly as they describe them.

It's similar to near-death experiences where, in different cultures, you'll find that all cultures have near-death experiences but depending on the religion, they'll encounter different beings. The experience will conform with their belief system, basically. So it may be that different people from different cultures and traditions will see different things, but what's universal is they're seeing and experiencing something that is experienced - how else can you say it - as another being. This could be like the example we used last week about the DMT experiences of encountering a stereotypical gray alien, and again, I'm not making any statement as to what value we should place on the actual reality of these events, whether we should take them at face value or if there's something more to them. I think there's something more to them. But it's easy to understand how these ideas came about, because if you look at the experiences people have, why do they think there are demons? Well, because they actually experienced what, to them, was a demon. It's not like they just imagined it and came up with this hypothesis for why something bad happened, "Oh, it must have been this impish, horned, creature out of there," No, people in altered states of consciousness experience this impish, horned demon looking creature, right, then they just wrote about it.

Of course that's no the only explanation. There's going to be all kinds of other stuff going on. But, it's obviously rooted in some kind of experience and all you have to do is look at the literature and read some experiences that people have to see that it makes sense where all this stuff comes from. But, for this one in particular, the absolute unified being, this is the type of experience that blows all of them out of the water. For some moment that may fell like it lasts an eternity, there's an experience of this grand unified being, which people have called god.

I think there are two distinctions that are made, and again, this comes down to some people from some religions are likely to experience one, and other people in other religions are likely to experience the other. Some may experience this unified being, as a being. So this guy knew when he had this experience, that this was an experience of god, in the philosophical language, of the ultimate. But on his level it's an experience, and for that experience, we use the word god. In altered states of consciousness studies they say, absolute unified being, or, if we look at it philosophically, we might say unified ultimate being, supreme being.

Again, we come back to the question of why do people have these experiences, and what is the nature of these experiences. I mentioned Mike Shermer last week, and I'll mention him again, because he's very annoying. He's one of those guys you like to hate. He's a pretty good sport, too, I've heard him interviewed by a couple of people who vehemently disagree with him, and he's always a good sport about being on the show, and not losing his cool. But, still, I disagree with pretty much everything he says. That might be an exaggeration.

But, guys like him would say that these experiences are just stuff going on in your brain, anomalous things in your brain that produce this experience and that there is no grand unified, absolute being that you are experiencing, and that's it, because that's impossible. That's usually what Shermer's arguments come down to, "It's impossible. How can you imagine how that could be the case? Therefore you shouldn't imagine that that could be the case, and therefore it's not true." There's the question. Could there be a level of some type of reality to this experience and what could it be? Could it just be that one person experiences absolute unified being and experiences that as something, maybe they're experiencing what they say they are, or some close approximation of what they're saying they are experiencing? Maybe when people experience strange beings in an altered state of consciousness, maybe those have some degree of reality, that isn't just some electrical signal in your brain like dreaming. Even, then, what is dreaming? We don't understand dreaming. There are so many things about consciousness that we just do not understand. We might get closer if we just change the assumptions that are at the root of our thinking about these sort of things, but really we just don't know.

So just to get that out of the way, whenever one of the skeptics or the atheists tries to write these things off, they don't really know. None of us know. So, I think it would be more profitable in the interests of knowledge, to approach it with an open mind. Could there be a reality to this and what is that reality? Could there be a reality to this, even if we bracket certain things off as impossible?

So, we could take some of the assumptions like the Dawkins and Shermer types take about what is possible in the world, and look at each of those individually and say they're valid or not, and I think some of them are. I totally agree that the philosophical definition of supernaturalism is impossible. I don't think it makes sense to be a supernaturalist in a certain sense. You can have an experience and call it supernatural, and that's fine. It might be a real experience, but I think people should know that when you use the word supernatural, it means above the natural, not natural. I just think that's a dumb place to start. If something exists in the world, if there's reality to something, it's part of the natural world. Why can't we just view naturalism that way? There doesn't need to be a supernaturalism.

I think that's the one of the biggest problems that the new atheists get into. They define supernaturalism in such a way, that they then don't have to look at anything that might be a natural paranormal or parapsychological phenomenon. They just define it out of existence, basically. Could these things be natural? Maybe they are part of the natural world. Maybe these experiences are part of the natural world. Maybe consciousness is part of the natural world in such a way that these things are possible and there isn't any breakage in the laws of causality.

Corey: In last week's show we discussed Collingwood's theory of the mind, and especially it's evolution through history. We talked about how the artist's way of viewing the world was based on beauty, and that in beauty there was some truth, but it wasn't all explicit. It was in the imagination so it contradicted itself. In religion, that imagination became reality. The imaginal forms became reality. We talked about religious experience and the kind of power it had and how you could have that experience and say, "This is reality, the imagination and the forms that came along with it, this is reality." Then in the scientific worldview, Collingwood writes that the theory, the abstract generalized laws of nature are reality. That is an attempt to become explicit about what we know, and I think that right now you can see it carried to an extreme with these new atheists, in terms of making everything abstract and mechanistic, trying to explain everything according to this caricature of human knowledge.

But Collingwood writes, in I believe it was Speculum Mentis, that "When the concrete or historical point of view is achieved after the scientific worldview, this is affected by recognizing and transcending the abstractness of the scientific point of view. Man now sees that even in calling himself a machine he had really been vindicating his own freedom, and in that discovery he grasps this freedom and makes it truly his own." He also writes that "Art rests on the ignoring of reality, religion on the ignoring of thought, science on the ignoring of fact. But with the recognition of fact, everything is recognized that is in a sense, real. The fact as historically determined is the absolute object."

And when we look at these experiences like the one you were talking abou, Harrison, it's a fact that people are experiencing these things. That's the historically determined fact. Once you recognize that, then, rather than defining them out of existence, rather it's in recognizing their reality and trying to just look at them for what they are; historically dependent, in their context, where they occurred, and understanding them from that point of view. It seems like the way forward. It's like Charles Fort's Parade of the Damned. Was that what he called it? {laughter}

Harrison: Yeah something like that {laughter}

Corey: Basically, all the facts that don't fit in to our abstract theories of reality, our abstract general laws of sociology, social psychology and physics. Not to dismiss all the thinking that went into understanding the physical world, but to say "Hey, let's not try to fit everything into some grand theory, in some unified theory," because that is the monotheistic approach, that attempt to create that one, big daddy god of them all theory that explains everything. In fact, we can't do that. It doesn't exist.

Harrison: So what they end up doing is creating a world view which is very good at explaining certain things, but it's very good at explaining a portion of reality. What they end up doing is taking that portion as all of reality, and just explaining away everything else. Basically, all experience that could be termed religious, and I guess we could expand that to just spiritual experiences, or near-death experiences, children remembering past lives, all the way to parapsychology like telepathy and psychokinesis. But, all of that is explained away either as imaginary, or as epiphenomenal, something that is created by the illusion which is created by just your body's natural functioning.

So there's no reality to it. Free will, for example, for a lot of these people is just an illusion. It's just an epiphenomenon. It's something that seems to exist to us but doesn't in reality. To some of these people, even consciousness itself is like that. We only think we're conscious. We only think we have experience, but it's just an epiphenomenon of the electrical activity in our brain. That should be an absurd statement to anyone who's currently conscious, because there's no "as-if" consciousness. "You just think that you're experiencing." Well no, experience is the basic level of experience. If you're experiencing, you can't get below experiencing and try to explain experiencing in terms of something that doesn't have experience. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't work.

But I mentioned that they write these things off as imaginary. That's something that I wanted to get into, that I mentioned in the beginning of the show, Collingwood's conception of religious imagery being based in the imagination in a similar way that art is except that, art will take any object of the imagination and just give it form in a work of art, but religion takes a selection of those images and then declares them to be reality. Now, with the discussion of the experience of that guy that William James quoted, we're asking the question "Could there be some reality behind the imagery, behind these experiences?" Can there be some level of reality to the objects of our imagination, that can't just be written off as imagination?

Corey: Right, can there be an unseen world? Religion as you think of it is how you relate yourself to that unseen world, how you protect yourself for it, you purify yourself, you prepare for the afterlife. It's all about preparing for, or interacting with this unseen realm that influences humanity in some way.

Harrison: There are two things there. One is the existence of this realm. We can make statements of fact about it. We can make like religion does. The distinction if often made between science and religion that science describes what is and religion describes what we ought to do. One has its root in the world and a description of the world, and the other has a goal or aim behind it, as in, what is the proper way to act within that world, which is studied by science.

But within religion, there is an aspect of making claims that presume to explain the world, statements about the way the world is made and about the nature of reality. That's number one. Number two is, knowing that, how do we interact with the world? How do we interact with not only the mundane world around us, but also that supernatural or other realm? So basically, what are the rules of engagement? Those are two separate, but interlinked ideas. We have statements of fact about the nature of reality, and then we have statements of 'should' about how to act within that reality, and with that reality.

Corey: And you could say that religious experiences, not assigning them any value in terms of, "This is the right religious experience" but every time there is some sort of a documented experience like that, it gives you information in some way. It has the potential to give you information about what that reality is.

Harrison: It's data, for sure.

Corey: It's data.

Harrison: This may sound like a non-sequitur, but I think math might be a way into the question about the nature of imagination, and the possible reality of objects of the imagination because there's a debate in the philosophy of mathematics and there has been for generations now.

Corey: Since Pythagoras possibly? {laughter}

Harrison: The debate's been around but these terms of the debate are more of a modern phenomenon. No, I guess the debate's been around forever, ever since math I suppose. How much reality should we give the objects of mathematics? If you think about it, from our modern materialistic worldview, mathematics should be impossible, because the only thing that exists is what we consider physical matter, something that can be manifested in a physical form and then all those bits of matter will interact in ways. When we study the way in which those interact, we find mathematics. But then, it seems that mathematics is also a strictly abstract thing that is true, and which can be engaged in regardless of any observation of the natural world.

For example, you can close your eyes and imagine a mathematical equation, and you can work you way through it, even just very simple addition, subtraction, powers. You have certain symbols that you manipulate and relate to each other in certain set patterns, and it works. The miracle of mathematics is that it works. Not only does it work abstractly, in the sense that no matter which way you do the numbers, you get the answer and everything fits together and works in these very ordered ways, it also works in the real world. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this on the show previously but one of the things that amazes me is oftentimes you'll find a theoretical mathematician who creates this weird, cool theory, and then it's only decades later that some physicist studying some subatomic particle interaction, will then find, "Oh, this interaction actually manifests that equation. That relation of numbers and mathematical objects applies to this physical situation." So in everything from Newton's Laws to advanced quantum physics, there's this mathematics going on behind it that works.

So the question has been, what is the nature of these mathematical objects? Are they real? And can they be real in a material universe? When you look at the philosophers who have been involved in this question, the only justification they can have is "We can't fit mathematical objects in our materialistic worldview so we just have to accept them as a brute fact. We can't explain them, but we can't understand the world without them even though we can't account for them whatsoever." We can't account for the fact that mathematical objects seem to have an objective reality, even if they exist in an abstract space, even though they can only be accessed mentally and abstractly, but at the same time they seem to manifest themselves in physical interactions. So it's actually a big mystery. We can't explain it today, but we used to be able to explain it, because this part of the debate and the question goes back to Aristotle and Plato.

Plato posited a Platonic realm, this other realm where abstract forms could exist. Aristotle didn't like that because he thought that any abstract entity can only exist within an actual entity. The neo-Platonists kind of reconciled the two and said "Where can abstract entities like mathematical objects exist?" Well, they must exist in a mind, because the only things that we know of that can hold abstractions are minds, then where is mathematics?" "Well, it's in the mind of god."

So, traditionally for centuries, the place where these abstractions and numbers seem to be real, but which don't exist physically as numbers, was the mind of god. Now that god is impossible and doesn't exist, we don't have a place to put numbers, and we talk about Platonism we have to answer the question "Where does this abstract realm exist, and how does it interact with our own?" That's a totally speculative question which lot of serious philosophers can't get behind. Where is this transcendent realm? How does it interact with ours. This is the problem with dualism that has raged since Descartes. You have two different types of something? How do you get them to interact? By definition, they can't. So there must be some reconciling of those two realms, the realm of matter and of realm of mind. Let's just say that it makes more sense to posit a universal Cosmic Mind than it does to just write anything of that sort off completely as materialism does.

Corey: So, then what else is in this Divine Mind? There's mathematics, which is part of the Divine Cosmic Mind. What else is there? Logic.

Harrison: Two weeks ago, we were talking about free will, and I brought up the example of breakfast. Well this time I'm going to use donuts instead. You can pick between different donuts, and which one are you going to pick? The only way to make a choice, is if one is weighted as more important that the others. So if you didn't have any feelings for any of these donuts, you wouldn't pick any one of them, because none would stand out from the others. In a sense, if you're going to make a choice, a free choice, as we'd call it, then there needs to be some weight given to the options. That weight is value, and we experience it through feeling, we experience it as value. There's an attraction towards it.

So if there is a Cosmic Mind in which we find eternal objects, like mathematical objects, it would also potentially be the source of values. If you use the example of truth, truth is another abstract thing. When you're looking around the world, you can't find truth in a physical form, right? "Oh, there's that piece of truth, and there's that's that piece of truth, that's that piece of lie." No, there's just stuff. Truth is an abstraction that requires a comparison to an ideal, a norm. It's a mental activity. S where and how does truth exist? If all there is, is matter, then we can't account for truth.

That's something on a fundamental level that materialists either don't comprehend, or haven't thought about. They haven't thought about the logical implications of what they think because if all there exists is matter, you can't have truth, and you can't have science, because what is your yardstick, right? If you have three different theories about something, let's say these theories came out of nowhere, which one is the better theory? In order for one to be better, you have to have a comparison to an ideal that is implicit in that. One has to confirm more to the ideal that the other two. When we say that that ideal is truth, that means that it corresponds to reality. How can you compare reality to this abstract theory without a mind? You can't make any of those comparisons without truth.

I think the reason that most people don't think about it is that it shows how ingrained the truth is to everyone. We know what reality is. We experience it every day. We know what happens when we're not in line with reality. If you think you're walking on a bridge and you're actually walking over the Grand Canyon and plunging to your death, you know what the difference is. One, you're either on a bridge or you're not on a bridge. Truth is the water in which we're swimming, if we were fish. We just can't escape that idea of truth, and that experience of truth, of reality that we encounter.

When we're trying to account for the facts of existence, and the facts of experience, and that would include everything from your everyday waking states of consciousness, to altered states of consciousness, to every kind of mental operation you can engage in, in any kind of mental activity, when you're looking at the grand totality of all of those, there are things which you need to be able to account for. Some of the big ones are mathematics, and just value in general, not even the concept of value, but the experience of value, just value itself. I don't think there's any more basic way of explaining value than just that. It's this feeling of importance. It is an intrinsic sense of importance, of value, and it has an effect on you.

We experience that in life, and life has experienced that for billions of years, that knowledge, that feeling when you're in line with reality, or when you're not, or when you're doing something that's going to be good for you, or when it's going to be bad for you. We experience our potential survival or destruction with our feelings. It expresses itself through emotions.

To bring it all back to the idea of the Cosmic Mind, the organizing principle of truth could only exist in a mind. I'd say that's a working hypothesis in the sense that unless we're going to try to posit something that we have no experience of, we should root it in the things that we actually know exist. We know minds exist, because we have them. Does it make more sense to think of truth having its source in something that isn't a mind, or is the ultimate mind? It makes more sense to posit an ultimate mind than it does to posit that truth is something that is not abstract or mental, that is just physical. That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Corey: When you posit this ultimate mind, do you run into the same problems that the original theists ran into that? This god, this ultimate mind, did that mind create the universe? What does that mind do? Where did we get our minds from? Are we part of that mind?

Harrison: I don't know. I guess that gets back to what we were talking about last week, about creation out of nothing and how the doctrine of creation out of chaos, which was the original Greek and Jewish idea, is that there's a pre-existent world but it's a all chaos. It isn't formed yet. But the existence of a pre-existent world, implies that it is not completely at the whim of the divine mind. You've got a chaotic body, and an organizing mind. When you throw that omnipotence, creation out of nothing idea out of the window, and just look at this idea of a chaos with a mind that directs it and orders it, and brings it into order, then you don't run into the same problems as you do with an omnipotent god, because you can account for free will without having to ask whether god controls all actions, or whether god gave you free will and could interrupt and could take over your mind, but chooses not to, or maybe he does take over your mind. You just get into silly questions that are kind of on the level of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. We wouldn't even be asking this question if we didn't have this idea of the omnipotent god to begin with.

Here's a way of looking at it. I really like what Peterson has been saying lately about the nature of consciousness. One of the things he says is if you look at consciousness, it seems as if the nature of consciousness is to encounter a sea of possibilities and then choose from those possibilities what to manifest. It's looking into possible futures and then manifesting one of those futures in the present, and that sets you in the direction to meet that ideal future that you're want to live in and that you're heading towards.

If that's the nature of consciousness, if we look in terms of that cosmic consciousness, with that chaos, that unordered chaos that is the world, perhaps it's analogous. So perhaps the cosmic mind actually sees possible worlds, entire worlds, and then makes a decision to see then that decision manifest in the world. Now how might that work?

Is it, world, chaos, you do this? How does that work if god is not omnipotent? I think this is where we get to the idea of the Cosmic King, or the ideal king, in comparison to the Cosmic Criminal. Maybe we can look at that comparison in depth, but looking at it in just one way, the ideal king - and this goes back to Mediterranean traditions like the idea king in Greece and Rome and the entire Mediterranean world back then, Near Eastern as well - is that the ideal king was the best person, the best citizen or inhabitant available of a people who was the most just, the most talented, the best person for the job, essentially and that through their actions, they represented god's will. They were a representative of god on earth.

What did they do? They brought order to the state or to the nation, to the people. They protected the people from disorder and potential chaos of the external world and they promoted the internal harmony of that group. How does a good king do that? What is real power in the human experience? It's persuasion, basically, not in a nasty way, not in a manipulative way but it's basically the presentation of a possibility to an individual consciousness, or to a mass of individual consciousnesses. "Here is a possibility, if you see the value in this possibility, then follow it."

If you imagine a great leader that everyone adores and looks up to, and they present an idea, people are going to naturally say, "Oh yeah, that's a great idea." Maybe it's not, but even if it is, then that's even better. You have a great idea that people should want and just by virtue of this powerful person presenting it, people are persuaded by it, and move towards it. It's not a great analogy, but it would be an analogy for the way a naturalistic god would work in the universe.

So it's not that god can just break through the barriers and cause the laws of causality to go haywire. There are no gaps in which god fits in and does his thing. It's that there's a causal web, a causal network of the entire creation which we study with science, which we experience as reality, and the influence of god is a constant influence within that network. That would be the presentation of possibilities themselves.

Corey: Possibilities in the mental way, like you were talking about - values and mathematics. You're talking about the mind itself is the possibilities. You said Jordan Peterson thought that consciousness was to select possibilities, potentialities and make them reality, out of the billions. But then that consciousness itself only sees them through the mind. That mind in and of itself, we're saying that is G-O-D god not G-A-W-D god,the presentation of all of the possibilities, the potentials that you can choose from.

Harrison: Right. The Cosmic Mind would be the source of those possibilities, but also what gives them force essentially.

Corey: Right.

Harrison: Because if you just imagine possibilities, again you come to the question of "Which possibility is better than the other one? What yardstick do I use?" It's almost like a cosmic telepathy kind of thing. The hypothesis would be that the Cosmic Mind is constantly telepathically projecting the best possibility possible into the minds of all creatures. Whether that creature makes that choice or not, is up to the creature's free will, the conditions surrounding them and their history. In the case of humans, this is a process philosophy viewpoint or a process theology, that god is constantly presenting the ideal aim in any given situation, and that humans are then free either to follow it or potentially to not follow it, and that's free will. You could have humans that totally ignore it, or the message is completely drowned out by other signals, and that could be signals from the past, from habit, or just competing signals where you've developed a taste for something that is not good for the world, not the best possible option.

You just see that in people, it just comes down to everyday life, when you look at some people, and you might say "You're not living up to your potential, you're making a bad choice, you don't have your priorities straight." In that moment that's what that person's priorities are. If they were to sit down and actually think it through, they'd say "Oh, this is a bad choice." Other people can see the situation objectively and say "Objectively, there's a better way that you could be doing this." How do they know? How can you even tell if one thing is better than the other? In a materialistic universe, no one thing is better than another thing. They're all just things. You can't have a physical, material value. Value is mental, abstract thing, it's a comparison. In a materialistic world, one thing is not better than the other but we all know that's not the case. We experience this every day, every instant of our lives is predicated on the idea that some things are better than others, that there is a better way and there is a worse way.

If there is a place for a natural god in the world, it would be as the vivifier and presenter of possibilities. It's a constant wish for the universe to be the best that it can be, just like we might constantly wish for the people we love to be the best they can be, for their own interest and ours, for the interest of everyone, just in service of potentially being better, living in an better world, and ideally, in putting into practice the best of all worlds.

Corey: Yeah. I think that fits the god the father or god the mother, the parental viewpoint that's been around for however many thousands and thousands of years and that for a lot of people, is just common sense. If they think about god for a moment, that's the kind of conception they have. In our mainstream culture, there's just a huge gap that was left by the secular, mechanistic viewpoint that said there's no god. Well once god was gone, there's no place for math, no place for values, no place for consciousness. Then one by one they just kept falling away, falling away, falling away. We've got no refuge for our common sense understanding of what god - not a bearded man in the sky, like we said. Last episode we talked about implicit truths in religion and how they're not explicit. They don't make absolute sense but the implicit truth of god, the father in the sky, that's basically the parent presenting the opportunities, the good parent, the guide through life, that lets you honor your free will to an extent. But there are also consequences in reality. You can't just go willy-nilly. Reality at some point smacks you in the face, sometimes with the baseball bat.

Harrison: {laughter} Well, maybe to wrap up, we can take it back to what we were talking about last week, in terms of the story, the grand narrative, being that there is disorder in the world and god will enter the world to set things right. Taken literally to a modern sensibility, it sounds like nonsense, but there are some deep ideas in there that may have a great degree of truth.

Before getting into that idea I want to make a comment on the father god with the beard thing kind of thing. God might not be an old bearded man, but it may be that an old bearded man is one of the closest representations for how it feels to interact with the supreme being of the cosmos, the mind of the cosmos. There's a fatherly nature to that. The feeling in a child of the interaction with the father may approximate to some degree, the feeling of a human in relation to the mind of the universe. It may be a very apt metaphor. Who know? That would require some actual thinking on the subject, that I don't think has been done to any great degree, or with any great degree of rigor or interest. What is metaphor and why does metaphor work? Why does this religious imagery work? Maybe there's something to that? This may be a fun thing to do and might help us out a bit as a species.

Coming back to the narrative, if we look at this narrative and try not to take it literally, what might it mean? Well, there's a constant state of disorder. The world itself, and humans in particular, are constantly on the edge between chaos and order, we're constantly in negotiation between the two. On the one hand, we're constantly in a state of relative disorder. We can always move towards a direction of order. It's always a possibility and it's what we're constantly striving for. But, there's also periods of greater disorder compared to other times and places. The idea being that there's something wrong and needs to be fixed. Now god will intervene. How will god intervene?

Traditionally that's been thought of in terms of miracles and revelations, revelation being a type of miracle; god intervening, getting into that gap in the causal framework, and having his way with the universe when, actually it may be that there's a reality to that in the sense that the message becomes clear, and the message is constantly being sent. What was it in Firefly, was it? The cosmic signal is always being sent, and there are times where it's that much more important to listen to the signal, and that is felt and experienced as conscience. It's a feeling. It could be more than that. It could be an altered state of consciousness, it could be a very intense and strange experience that carries the message, the main point being that it's a natural phenomenon. Religious experiences and altered states of consciousness are natural phenomena, not that their materialistic but that they are part of the natural world. It's something that's part of our causal framework, part of what we experience.

Corey: It's a part of how we explain the world, like you were saying. If you want to make sense out of the entire world, you need that in your vocabulary really.

Harrison: It needs to be taken into account. Ideally a good philosophy, a good science and a good religion should all take into account all the facts of existence. You can't ignore any facts. That's what you get when you look at the materialists and the atheists. They will ignore and write off certain facts. They will pretend or convince themselves that they're doing so based on sound logic and reasoning and appraisal of evidence but, what it comes down to is that they either don't know what they're talking about, they haven't looked at it, or they have dismissed the phenomenon as impossible, and therefore conclude that the evidence is bad simply because they've already made the judgment that it's impossible.

So they're basically putting the cart before the horse in that case, because they haven't actually looked at the evidence. What you should do is look at the evidence and say "Okay, what can account for that evidence?" Instead of saying "Oh that fact is impossible, therefore that fact didn't happen." You don't get to do if you're pretending to be a sound thinker. Well, with that said, is there anything that we planned on saying that we haven't said yet?

Did you have another William James quote?

Corey: Yeah, I do, and it's relatively interesting. We could look at this in terms of how religion is experienced, the inner life of religion in the most general term, could be the idea that there is an unseen or invisible order our there that we interact with. In order to survive and thrive, we have to be able to harmoniously adjust ourselves to it in some way, or at least acknowledge its existence and be awake and open to it. This is what William James wrote:

The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our objective belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by the sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling, and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had caused this.

Yeah, so, you never know. Especially in today's world you never know. Everywhere you go there are just so many crazy ideas floating around. So, you need a good religion.

Harrison: That quote reminded me of what we were talking about in regards to Collingwood last week, just the idea of an aesthetic consciousness and a religious consciousness. When he talks about the two he says it's kind of like knowing on some deep primordial level that isn't explicitly thinking. You feel it, basically. When you hear a great piece of music that really moves you, you can't immediately put into words why that is or what it is about the music that moves you. "Oh, it's was that G sharp over the A that gave it a grand sense of meaning."

Corey: And if you were to say that, you'd lose it.

Harrison: Exactly. It's almost as if something about some of these altered states of consciousness is that they open up or facilitate an experience or a knowing that's on a different level, a different module of consciousness that is maybe more primordial, more primitive, more basic or less complex, less highly ordered than the kind of conscious, rational thinking that we think we have when we're awake. It's something deep, basically. It could be the that subconscious is the actual means by which or...

Corey: The instrument. It plays some instrumental role in detecting.

Harrison: Okay, with that said, I think we'll probably end it there, the overall message being that we may have this idea of god as the literal symbol that we're presented as children and by religious figures. We're presented with this literal image of god but that does not encapsulate or encompass the extent of the possible reality of god. We shouldn't limit ourselves to the symbol and that's what both dogmatic fundamentalists do, and it's also what dogmatic atheists do. They take things literally and don't try to look at things behind the symbol and try to find out what the actual meaning is and how that meaning might have relevance for our lives, and extreme importance for our lives, and for living a life that is not only good, but that is rationally backed up. All the atheists want reasons for believing in certain things. They want a good justification for let's say, believing in a supernatural god. I totally agree with them. I don't think there's any good justification for believing in an omnipotent, supernatural god. Now, that's not to say that there's no value in religious experience, and Michael Shermer would even agree with that. He'd say that these experiences are real, we just don't know the nature of them.

I'd just like to add if we could get rid of the baggage of 1800 years of some pretty dumb philosophical and theological presuppositions, then we might actually be able to come up with a philosophy that can encompass both science and religion in which they can both work without contradicting each other. In my mind at least, that's a way of ordering the mind, which then orders life. It's a way of bringing a little more order to the chaos of our lives. So, I hope that god can do that for you. {laughs} I hope you will bring god into your lives, dear listeners, and pet his giant god-beard, in the process. Is that blasphemous enough? {laugher}

Corey: You're getting there!

Harrison: Well with that said, thanks for tuning in everyone, we'll be back next week for another show with some topic and tune in tomorrow for Behind the Headlines. Take care everyone.

Corey: Thanks for listening, everybody, have a great week.

Reader Comments

binra · 2018-06-10T13:18:53Z

For this era or cycle of human consciousness, the 'gods' in the first instance were a synchronicity of the 'heavens above' as an interaction of awesome and catastrophic personality construct - also known as subjective consciousness - as a distortion filter over Universal being - for the physical experience as an exclusive and subjected 'reality' is the reflection of the attempt to take on manually what once came naturally. We become identified in our tools - which in the first instance are symbolic or signs as the nature of archetypal patterns of the breakdown and attempt to escape, repair or overcome it.

I see this as being replicated ever since in shifting forms of entanglement of victim and victimiser - where a god of terror becomes the power to appease by sacrifice and the need to believe in some power of protection became basis of a sense of control. For the mimicking of the heavens was the belief-experience of the outer CAUSING and DIRECTING the inner. (Reversing the order of Creation - though the inner is in fact inside time and space rather than inside a body or 'mind').

The catastrophic experience of survivors and inheritors of trauma is the development of the power to forget and deny it, distantiate and retell from a translation or dilution to terms of our world. The terror of unhealed split consciousness is thus the projections of denial that are then experienced as 'the world' - and the intensity of the need under fear operates as a singular directive - as your survival instinct - embodies in the personality construct. The urge to assert narrative control - and the power to enforce it is the seeming unification of self AGAINST threat. The god-king is an organising structure for both the emulation of power as 'imprinted' by extreme cosmic conditions of interplanetary relational and electrical charge activity, and development of consciousness as a hierarchical structure of perceived reality as a family constellation of chaos and order held over chaos. This is evident to a simple observation of our own thought, feeling and reaction. Order from chaos - but both are of the same root being perceived as polarised deniers of each other. Yet order is always breaking down to chaos and chaos always calling forth order. They are the same thing running the good cop bad cop mind trick.

But definitions are the key or template to all meanings that then follow and the embrace of what was previously defended or rejected as chaos is the opening of recognition OF denied and rejected (demonised) self and thus its acceptance and release from manifesting in your experience AS your denier.

The idea 'God' is thus an alloy of love hate - that characterises our own consciousness and our interpretation of existence. Attempts to deny hate and be loving succeed in generating blind spot or masking over of unhealed hate, but they are also a vehicle for the growing of willingness to accept love - without first deciding what forms or conditions it must take. the wheat and the tares are the interactions of hate that is usually masked in form and love that often embodies the forms that expand or break the social taboos of often unconscious fear-directives - but also explorations that open and re-trigger deeper fears that also can be seen as a hierarchy of necessary control holding back a negative creation. (We lost trust in our being).

The control mind is thus a derivative of the idea of a god mind in terms of power in the world regardless the terms and symbols it uses. the attempt to take god out of nature is the death of natural philosophy as a human science in its yielding of the human to a mechanical system of control - for while there are natural systems of informational relation and communication - they are of a completely different order than the lording it idea of control of a narrative identity.

And the use of God or Being or nature for other than inherent worth lived and shared is the 'mind' of a manipulative differentiation in image and form. Yet this is the structure of leaned ability that becomes a channel for the transparency to a greater communication and participance in this and ever moment of existence. But not adding a greater power to a 'self' in a world of reversed cause and effect.

It might be apparent that those who seek to add to themself lose their life and those who give of what they are increase their awarenes and appreciation of life. It is a matter of lack based identity or an exteding of the aliveness in whatever we think say and do - which is simply natural to joy. What basis for joy in a world of guilt? Only the pale and sick substitution of escaping it in the transfer to others. Who loves to hate must hate to love. This is a reversal - not a defence.

hkoehli · 2018-06-11T02:37:00Z

binra I have very little idea what you're talking about, so I'll just respond to one sentence:

"What basis for joy in a world of guilt?"

Why a "world of guilt"? Why not a world where guilt is a part, but not the whole? Guilt is an essential emotion. Without we cannot change or become better. Extremes don't help. I could just as easily ask: "What basis for guilt in a world of joy?" A world of joy (without guilt) sounds like a psychopathic nightmare.

No roses without thorns.

binra · 2018-06-11T11:26:35Z

hkoehli Because you put the world first and come after, you think at a different level and we can misinterpret each other.

I could have indicated the same thing in any number of equivalent terms.

What is the basis for joy in a world of sickness, war, treachery and death?

You may feel it unfair to paint the world such - but how much of the 'positive' is in truth an attempt to deny, escape or make bearable the 'real world' of such ongoing, inescapable and terrible experience - where even such loves as are

In terms of the personality construct - I would agree with you to a point - because the 'separation-trauma' by which a mind is made is a necessary part of the development of consciousness in physical terms; of the physical experience and an adapted and conditioned 'self' running within its terms. In 'religious symbology' this self is not the Self of God's Creation, but a fig leaf thinking over a sense of lack, loss and a sense of personal guilt. I didn't say it was justified or true - but that its belief is the self-division or subjective mind that we live 'from' without truly pausing it to look within. So I am not a teacher of guilt, but of the inherent capacity to recognize and be recognized in truth - and while this can be described in all sorts of terms our living recognition of love's awareness in another is its awakening to the embrace of our Source. What could possible interject between true Cause and Effect? Nothing. But in a mind attending its own image, can we believe we have created unlike love - as a segregative, self-inflation that inevitably 'falls' into division, because it has only the power you give it and what you give to a 'bit on the side' adulterates. undermines and conflicts with true - and so a 'self-doubt' or indeed Source-doubt creeps in and like a phishing ruse, steals your identity by substituting a belief in an oppositional or evil self - that is terrible or intolerable to feel and so is packaged up like toxic debt by ingenious thinking, into complex instruments of a false currence - ie - we find ways to project or dump our (believed and reactive) guilt away from the 'self' that survives to persist its 'escape' of a life. only anything and everything (everyone) else, and what cannot be outsourced is redefined in the corporate account as a redistribution of psychic energy. IE - nothing is really healed but masked over and suppressed, ignored or called the human condition. But the need to maintain and feed guilt's demand for payment operates unconsciously as shadow power as the ongoing sabotage or attack on all that is truly beautiful and good - even to the extent that the true must be kept hidden from terror that shifts form and even deceive in forms of love and protection.

When we are 'called' we no longer wish to hide and be hidden from truth - despite any configurations of fear, unworthiness or hate - and so these things are revealed to a true willingness in a different light.

The psychopathic nightmare is rising to our waking consciousness - but our participation in its framework is hidden. Because I feel the 'bubble' of a world is already breaking to an influx or Life initially seen through the lens of fear (as the reliving of separation trauma) I feel willing to speak to the 'territory' of the pain in the heart and garmented and 'runaway' confusions of a mind in its own spin.

But I am not seeking to 'pop' you - or anyone's bubble - and so if a reader picks up something they are inclined to wall out. ignore of defend against that is their right and their power of choice in its current awareness.

Freedom from guilt is not of our own effort or achievement but as a self conceit. Paradoxically owning and facing what is energetically moving within us is the point of awakening sanity because no one can heal or release what they are not the owner of. And yet even this release is not our 'doing' as process of self-help or self-purging but the nature and gift of our Source - for the grace of our existence is never withheld - but we look away by insisting on seeing through a glass darkly. IE: there is something given more importance now than listening for, noticing and recognizing and aligning in the 'Call to joy'.

I use joy as one of the innate qualities to a wholeness of being - all symbols can be misused as substitutes for, instead of pointers to, the Living. Yet even a 'fake world' is redeemed in true purpose - and so indeed we are given a new perception of a guiltless world. To the 'ego' such is impossible because its worship of sin sickness and death make a world where perfect love is unbelievable - and its substitution-version of love would imagine this as a total sacrifice and loss of self - and so it is seen hateful and heretical.

Those who love to hate must hate to love.

To become intuitively aware of the 'reversal' that runs a world where 'everything is backwards!' is to stir a childlike curiosity. Awakening is no more complex in its nature that you are.

"The Emperor has no clothes!" said the child.

'And who told you you were naked sayeth the Lord?"

A spirit of true enquiry is the root of science.

the sharing of a true love is the root of religion.

At root they two facets of one.

Acting out of true with who you are generates dissonance of being that alerts you to out-of-true thinking that then acts out (for our acts are always the expression of what is thought or believed 'within'). The idea of recognizing and repenting immediately - is not making a guilt script by which to generate a budget, a crusade or a sense of negative self-specialness. But noticing and correcting error where it is. The world is busy in the crusade to correct errors where they are not - as the attack on the symptoms and the use of inflammation and conflict to divert from greater fears that themselves are masked in terms of conflict but are beneath the fear of exposure to loss of self and a returning vengeance. Collectively you have here an apocalyptic scenario, but are you willing to see the unveiling of deceits in love of true? or persist in the investment in the 'defence against the inevitable' that sacrifices Life to keep its own 'self' under the belief it is 'saving the world', when it is the attempt to save Humpty - the fall guy without whom all the king's horse and all the king's men would be out of a job. But actually restored to true function. the health of the Land is the health of the Soverign Will - but this is not in persons, but is the true movement of the heart. Listen there and know without any attempt to define and control. Be renewed in Life of Life and look up from an image that was identified in error.

But not because 'I or anyone says so' - but only as you find yourself in resonant recognition. Why not live the life we are given to be the unfolding of instead of clinging to a sense of lack seeking power and finding struggle? In this day as we meet it and in the moment at hand.

13 Muluc · 2018-06-10T18:56:09Z

Nice word salad, guys. It almost sounds like you're making sense. You're not though, because:

1. You don't define the words you're using. What do you specifically mean by "religion/religious", "god", "truth", "real/reality"? Do you even know?

2. You use the same words to refer to multiple concepts. This error is a consequence of the previous one. It's as though you are talking about Bob Ross, Bob Barker and Bob Dylan at the same time, but you consistently refer to them as "Bob" without distinction.

3. You don't assign those concepts to their correct categories. If you did, you wouldn't need to wonder whether "the objects of mathematics" belong to the material or imaginal realms because mathematics belongs to the category of language. A language is a set of symbols used for describing or mapping reality or experience. Mathematics is a perfect language because its symbols (or "objects") have only one possible definition. English is an imperfect language because its symbols (words) can have multiple definitions, which is why you need to specify which one you intend (see error 1.).

hkoehli · 2018-06-11T02:26:28Z

13 Muluc 1) Yes, I know. But to adequately explain each would take at least 40 hours, or a book or two. Keep tuning in, hopefully we can get there piece by piece. It's only an hour-long show - please cut us some slack.

2) If you can't follow the distinctions based on the context, point out some specific examples and we can clarify them for you. Or maybe you can clear up a genuine conflation or confusion on our part.

3) Mathematics is not just a language, and some of the biggest minds in contemporary philosophy think it's essential to wonder about the nature of mathematical objects - if you want to be rational. For some places to start, check out the sections on math in the chapter "Whitehead and the Crisis in Moral Theory: Theistic Ethics without Heteronomy" in David Ray Griffin's "Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy", or the chapter on math in "God Exists, But Gawd Does Not", and the works he cites. I'm not aware of any materialist philosophers who have adequately solved the "Platonic", "Benacerraf" and "Godel" problems in relation to what you might call the "definitions" of mathematical symbols, i.e. mathematical objects. Then, read Whitehead, who was actually a mathematician. I can't claim to represent his philosophy adequately (and I'm not a mathematician), but it sounds like you're not familiar with his work - or the work of others doing philosophy of mathematics, and the problems they have run into.

LindaMay · 2018-06-11T13:52:05Z

hkoehli great answer

binra · 2018-06-11T23:25:05Z

13 Muluc You are welcome to your pigeon hole system - and yet you are also welcome in the Heart O God. How can I say this? Because I know I am not 'special' or deserving in the terms of the person I thought I was - and yes the mass murderer is down there in the personality structure and not so hard to see.

It is true that words and symbols can mean many things and communication lost to lost in translation. Context is everything. Forms can deceive when framed in an invested set of beliefs and definitions.

I have let go of the database of conditioned and acquired 'meanings' of triggered association or inherited belief as a basis for a true and present appreciation of anything.

The willingness to choose NOT to force life or anyone else into your demanded 'conditions' so as to judge and react as if the judgement is true, is the reintegration or awakening to a true listening and a true seeing. Who has ears - shall hear - because there is nothing that can block the willingness to know without revealing its own ruse and becoming an education that serves the heart's purpose.

The nature of a 'self' is a witness to its 'father'. Look at what the belief in Humankind as illusion running upon a mechanical play of chemistry has fruited - the assertion of a control system of human units - that uses the illusion to induce the units to enslave themselves. And yet I can look at the same data and see the nature of the ego or self image from the perspective of the energetic field of relational communication that the Idea of Living Universe points to.

Whatever 'story' you make is your reward.

But the personality level is a narrative assertion, control and continuity that opens experience of time and space.

What would it be to read the Bible as all about You while couched in a story to hold a cultural identity to preserve its continuity, for beneath all its unfolding of divisions and conflicts, trials and revelations, it is a story of love - through the experience of loss, rejection, hard hearted law for hard hearted times, and a first covenant for holding order over chaos, that prepared the way for a second as the law of love.

I see through the course of my life that I can only ever interpret anything at the level of my own current beliefs and in that sense I always meet a self reinforcement to the 'self' I accept true by acting as if it is. So in the relinquishing of the role of interpreter to a living discernment instead of a looping survival reflex, I find ever greater depth as I accept the revealing of it and live as if it is true rather than hoard it in a database of old wine bottles.

I don't say 'believe this or that' so much as why not be curious about what you live from as if true if it doesn't bring you joy in being?

A sense of self-unworthiness will shun the light of joy to luxuriate in 'being right'. I called it 'guilt' but I could also call it lies.

I am willing to use any of a wide range of word, phrase, symbol and metaphor to illuminate a knowing in your own heart - but you must be the willingness and desire to know or I sow where nothing will grow. The 'territory' to which words and symbols point is lost when they are used without a living sense of the meaning give witness to. So in that sense I congratulate you on bringing that truth into awareness. To take the Name in vain is to take it from life and use it to serve a vanity. But God is not mocked and a vanity is undone of its prodigal wretchedness - by walking out of it's bankruptcy in willingness to serve a true Father that cannot be claimed as 'son' from the state of a wasted inheritance. But to the true father - your truth was never in question because he Knows who He Created - and Created by Knowing - "This is my beloved Son who is my delight!". What did Jesus do? He answered his Calling to abandon self-specialness in joining with the common folk to partake of a ritual act outside the proscriptions of the Law of the Establishment - that embodied a wave of popular support in times when the priest or power class was corrupt. They could not reach the hearts of those who suppressed them so they sought to clear their own heart of false devotions in the simple message witness and ritual consecration of The Baptist. Repent. John had great faith in in the light but could not accept in in himself because his sense of guilt demanded a separation. Jesus had faith in the light and accepted the light in himself as the recognition of light in others and the true nature of Creation beneath the appearances of a world of division. Now see that guilt demands separation and so many were attracted because they desired light and yet misinterpreted and mad special so as to not hear - 'go and do likewise' or 'as I have loved you, so love one another. And so they made all sorts of 'yes but's' that served to protect them from what they were not yet ready to accept - and Jesus embraced them equally while addressing their questions and concerns. To some he could speak in more direct terms and to others in stores and parables that carried meanings that deepened with living. But his church was founded on the true recognition that Peter awoke in - not a special role for the person of Peter, for wherever we even momentarily recognize another as ourself, "there I Am".

Not 'I think therefore I am' - but the fulfilment that comes when ye thinketh not. The thinking self avoids the void as non-existec or non-support for an identified sense of existence, but what seems empty is the Source and Nature of all things. A point of stillness within all seeming motion. Be still and know God - is be still of your own thinking and be renewed in truth. You may think this sounds impossible but you are innately able to recognize the truth of your own heart's knowing. It really does have your name on it. And of course it calls you because it is your own Call.

I don't know why I wrote that after expressing willingness to use non religious terms - that is what was alive in me and I followed it.

broos · 2018-06-10T21:13:16Z

STILL Having difficulty with the concept 0f INFINITY ?

Brakar · 2018-06-10T22:59:57Z

hmm, maybe 120+ years will do the trick as a "synonym"? (aka from before one were born to after one is dead)

btw; according to the bible, god was a mass-murderer. why follow a mass-murderer? benefits?

hkoehli · 2018-06-11T02:29:06Z

Brakar Following a mass murderer might have expedient benefits, but none worth selling your soul for.

George L · 2018-06-11T13:41:30Z

Please forgive me If I am repeating from part 1. I simply cannot remember what I wrote then. My response files were destroyed.

Who or What is 'god'?

The concept of 'god' is approximately 500 years old. Who or what was worshiped before?

Who created Adamu (Adam)? Adamu/Adam means first of its kind, the first people created.

Shortly after Creation, there was a war between the Powers ('gods' if you will), why?

Why has there always been the battle of the sexes?

When was the idea of evil introduced?

Why was Lucifer "The bringer of Light' made into evil?

Why Seth made to appear evil?

Why was black removed as the symbol of purity, and replaced with white?

There are hundreds of similar questions.

These questions need to be answered, truthfully, before proceeding further.

Shalom

hkoehli · 2018-06-11T15:50:38Z

George L 1) Big question. Not an easy answer. But a start: the ultimate source of order/information/value/truth.

2) It's not 500 years old. It's at least as old as Greek philosophy, and probably older, in one form or another.

3) Adam is a myth.

4) Says who?

5) Has there been?

6) The idea? Who knows. Depends on how you define evil. Arguably, it's been around forever, since value has been around forever.

7) Don't know, don't really care. Lucifer is a myth.

8) Ditto.

9) Ditto.

I don't think these questions 'need' to be answered. Maybe they're interesting and important to you, but I don't see the necessity.

binra · 2018-06-13T21:36:37Z

George L The Mythic Records going back to the end of the Younger Dryas, holds the Planets to be Gods - but they didn't have the concept of planet until much later. We don't understand now because the cosmic conditions AND our consciousness are different and in a sense 'amnesial' to our past - because in a sense we are trying to escape it whilst 'unconsciously' repeating it.

The activation of consciousness coincided with experiencing the 'Creation' of the Heavens. As above, so below.

Archetypal qualities were projected onto the 'Heavens' and emulated. The god-kings were the idea and acceptance of organised City States. There was a long unfolding 'drama' from a 'benign and abundant Saturnian Age (Chronos was the 'birth' of the concept of time as cycles) Saturn was (in the period mentioned) the first and best Sun. Plasma at arc mode intensity runs like our current Sol. In glow mode plasma is like the waters and streams of aurora borealis or phenomena such as 'STEVE' as recently named by NASA. Plasma at dark mode is detectable of electromagnetic sensors. We live (are actually) an Electric Universe that is also a 'Screen'' for the experiencing of Itself. MEANINGS are given or extended and received or experienced.

The blurring of the first 'archetypal expression' with the human self-construct and cultural development of an activated subjective (dissociated) consciousness is the nature of all who were 'descended from the Gods' - survivors made in the image of their conditioning.

The 'war in the Heavens was awe-full, terrifying and often directly catastrophic. The linkage of the 'God-King as the representative of power and the overseeing of the sacrifice to appease such a God (and a priesthood who learned the patterns and cycles of the Heavens).

The splitting of consciousness to self-imaged 'lordship' over the chaos - is the root of the idea of good and evil as 'personal' judgement and the basis for narrative control and continuity set over and against feared 'chaos'.

The key planets involved were much closer to us, larger in the sky and some at times activated into 'arc-mode' Suns. The attribution of 'evil' or guilt to the vanquished should need no explanation as the justifying narrative of violence made 'justified'.

I believe in the East black is the symbol of purity. The assigning of 'God' to created light is of course a polarising against the pure receptive Void in which it vibrates AS light. Symbols can be used for shifting and conflicting purposes. Until waking from the nightmare of the 'War of Self' as the restoration of unified Will - a mind divided against itself fragments and convolutes and entangles itself in guilted fear.

So understanding the past is not healing the past and the truly unified 'religion and science' restores a truly present focus instead of getting lost in its own reflected image. Enquiry challenges the believed reality and living love embodies it to witness by its fruits.

You can only unfold the recognition of what meanings you are already habitually operating from and then indeed bringing a genuine curiosity to bear when you find they are not true - or at least they are not truly who you are.

You are correct that without a true foundation, one cannot in fact proceed at all. Yet that foundation is not found outside the being of you, but of course it will be 'outside' the scope of what you think you know and who you think or limit yourself to be.

The patterns or archetypes of core relational relations and the chaos and restoration to order of the breakdown of communication is our own mind, our own story and the underlying dramatic narrative structure to a self in story. The recognition that you are NOT your story is not its demonisation but a transcendence of awakening at an embracing 'upstream' awareness that simply does not hold or have conflict. This is untranslatable in this world excepting as the active forgiveness of a release of the past - and imagined future to a true presence that is 'known by its fruits'. Attempts to articulate are always used by the 'war-mind' to justify the capture or domination of minds and the subjugation of bodies to private gratification.

I offer this to stir an intuitive resonance and invite a childlike or innocent curiosity not to persuade or induce belief without your own recognition and integration. What is a test for truth? The thinking mind can accept a deceit as if true and by reaction, give power to the framing of the deceit. If all you want is beliefs to reinforce a private sense of salvation then your own mind will make a false framing of revealed truths.

Intuitive recognition and the opening of the receptive in desire are two facets of One. Seek and you shall find. The 'ego' is the fig-leaf art of seeming to communicate while actually defending separateness. Seeming to seek while ensuring the cause lies hidden. Not because it is 'evil' but because it has misidentified in the fear of hating the hateful and fearing the fearful. A true healing is the undoing of a faulty formulation or appreciation of reality.

binra · 2018-06-14T17:29:37Z

George L Saw this again

Who or What is 'God'!

Anything else is a definition of 'differentiation' in thought and image.

George L · 2018-06-11T13:52:18Z

It completely slipped my mind to ask - Who wrote the bible?

When the gibberish subsides, read "The Africans Who Wrote The Bible", by Dr. Nana Banchie Darkwah.

Reading this book will begin the realization of truth. And the understanding of why no one before had the 'capacity' to understand/know who wrote the bible.

Apart from the bible, learn where the Sanskrit originated, etc.

When the truth is learned about the origin of the ancient books, then we can begin breaking down things.

We can start 'convesating' about dimensions, and the people with the capacity to travel freely back and forth, etc.

We can talk about Thoth, Amenti, Hall of Records, the Dogons, Dagara, etc.

Shalom

hkoehli · 2018-06-11T15:51:43Z

George L Probably Alexandrian Jews, utilizing some pre-Hellenistic sources. Read Russell Gmirkin.

Brakar · 2018-06-11T17:20:15Z

If one is interested in history/ancient middle eastern cultures and read about those peoples religions, it is easy to see that many of the stories and consepts in the different religious texts are similar/the same. The old testamet can easily be seen as a compilation of old egyptian texts/an evolution. Eg the holy trinity Osiris/Horus/Isis, Akhenathens monotheism, Seth as satan etc. Also this religion [Link] can easily be viewed as the father of later religions. Read, and you shall be enlightened.

Joyly · 2018-06-11T14:53:43Z

I agree that if you read the Bible then god is a mass murderer. And not just the Bible, many of the holy books have contradictions in them and therefore cannot be depended upon. These books were written by men, amended by men, and in particular the priesthood that wanted to control us.

The God I know through my personal prayer is all loving, compassionate, generous and kind. God created a system whereby we can easily connect to God and receive His love and His truth via our conscience. I have personally experienced these things and if I can then so can anyone - if they want.

We can learn much of Gods nature and character by observing nature - the abundance, variety, beauty, creativity, mathematics and science. Look at the mathematics of the golden ratio present in things like pineapples, sunflowers, even the simple rose and the proportions of the human body. Imagine the science and mathematics involved in every single function within the human body - something humans cannot replicate. Nothing is random, everything is predictable, by design.

Mankind confuses what God made with what man has made. God made everything good. Man made accidents, crime, guns, weapons, murder and war, pollution, the warming of the oceans, the destruction of the Forrest's, these things that are wrong are of our making, not Gods and we can't expect God to fix them. God wants us to fix our errors, take personal responsibility for our creations and when we have a pure desire to do this, all Gods laws will assist us.

hkoehli · 2018-06-11T15:57:36Z

Joyly "I agree that if you read the Bible then god is a mass murderer. And not just the Bible, many of the holy books have contradictions in them and therefore cannot be depended upon."

Depends on what you're depending on them for.

"These books were written by men, amended by men, and in particular the priesthood that wanted to control us."

Probably in a lot of cases, even most perhaps, but not in all.

"God created a system whereby we can easily connect to God and receive His love and His truth via our conscience."

Or maybe that's just the natural relationship between the ultimate and the limited. God need not have "created" it so.

"We can learn much of Gods nature and character by observing nature - the abundance, variety, beauty, creativity, mathematics and science. Look at the mathematics of the golden ratio present in things like pineapples, sunflowers, even the simple rose and the proportions of the human body. Imagine the science and mathematics involved in every single function within the human body - something humans cannot replicate. Nothing is random, everything is predictable, by design."

Some things might be random, but I agree with the first bit. I don't think there could be beauty, creativity (i.e. novelty), math or science without a cosmic mind.

"Mankind confuses what God made with what man has made. God made everything good."

Humans have their part to play in that. Perhaps God is that which presents the good to the consciousness of the human - that's what makes it valuable. It's up to us to make it happen, where we can.

binra · 2018-06-13T22:11:09Z

hkoehli In truth there is nothing that of himself a man can 'do' because he is neither of himself or himself apart and alone. the assigning of the power of 'doing' to the idea of self image set over and against the 'otherness - and the whole is a 'creative distortion' from which comes the self-inflation and blindness of disconnected private thought and the subjection and consequent struggle in terror and in vengeance to escape or overcome the hated or feared 'enemy' or condition.

So everything that is 'done' is in the acceptance and expression of Idea. The living Idea of Creation is without division or separation in any sense of conflict - but the imaged substitution of a 'stepped down' or virtualised 'mind in emulation' runs the idea of polarise opposition or 'divide and rule out'. The first function of an illusion is the divert from, cover over or hide the true. An illusion is anything desired and believed or given priority of focus and reality that is not true. And so the sense of taking our own truth becomes a substitute for accepting our own uniqueness as facets of one gift shared in all.

Man will seek freedom in 'doing' and lose himself thereby or abandon futility to embrace being that is already the 'movement' within itself of the purpose of recognising the extension of Self in All. - And He looked at the Creation and behold it is very Good! This has a correlation in "This is my beloved in whom is my joy!"

Acts can be the witness to inspired appreciation or the witnessing of a loss of the awareness of the living qualities of being in 'dead thinking' seeking its own reinforcement as if thereby to live.

So written by man is insinuating a range of suppositions and beliefs about 'Man' based on highly selected criteria for witnesses - IE we seek to find the reinforcement of our current belief. Of course assertions or masking in belief even to extreme self denials cannot but hide what is actually 'thinking in the heart. Anyone in fear interprets fearfully and distorts the communication. In practical terms we are all an alloy or misidentifiction of love and fear - where each can be taken for the other and thus a god of fear can be 'worshipped' and sacrificed to as if to find salvation under such a framing. Such is the structuring of the mind in the world in general. But God didn't 'DO' it. God is the gift and grace of awareness of existence - your creative function belongs in what is First but you are not compelled to obey a coercive 'god'. And the slavery and persecution under such a tyranny is the conditions for the awakening to the withdrawal of faith in sacrifice of true to a fakery that says it is too big to fail or the penalty is too fearful to allow you to move. A little willingness of a true desire meets the totality of truth that does not destroy what you have made, but guides and supports in unmaking the false to the revealing of true. If you have no current attraction or resonance to a something others find helpful - shake the dust off your sandals and move on after giving your blessing to what does activate and energise your 'aliveness' or joy in being you. if you want to fool yourself - for your own reasons known or hidden, then you shall - but the fruits or experience of joylessness will reveal a dissonance in the 'self presentation'. This is the opportunity to notice and discover what you did not expect - but it is also where the voice of judgement comes in quickly to shut down a true awareness.

hobnyeba · 2018-06-12T09:04:25Z

This "God as mass murderer" statement, whether coming from a pro-bible ("shut your eyes it's not the real God") or anti-bible (offended or unreasonably ashamed?) person, just strikes me as simplistic thinking. At least the show/Whitehead/whoever provides some answer, even if it seems false: if God is not omnipotent, then we don't have to ask such questions. (Not sure (anymore) why God can't be omnipotent as well as an organizing mind, but I am pretty dense/it's a dense subject.)

But yeah, read it another way: God showed or people "intuitively" knew the proper course; if they didn't take it then causality or so-called "karma" (without the emotional force behind that word - necessarily) lead to their destruction. It's a story to influence people to follow a more orderly/just/peaceful society. Like all religions - like all myths and like all good fiction. Because of this materialists and atheists can easily come to the "best" values, by virtue of being in society and making conscious comparisons, even if they are less conscious of why they are doing it. Then again, they're no worse at that than anyone. Sometimes materialists do make sense to me, I admit. Why wouldn't some things order themselves automatically, even to the point of feeling and thinking and then from there consciousness and intelligence?

Good show.

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