There is no G!d...

[AdvaitaZen]

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn't very much.

~ Eckhart Tolle

 

[AdvaitaZen]

Do not try to become anything.
Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.

~ Ajahn Chah ~



Disregard whatever you think yourself to be and act as if you were absolutely perfect -- whatever your idea of perfection may be. All you need is courage.

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (from 'I Am That')

 

[AdvaitaZen]

All pointing, but restricted to ever being ABOUT.

Words can never be IT.

 

[cliftor]

Hello Chris: merely a thought of mine-
social and cultural programming drives a person inward toward self. There are no answers there.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

Hello Chris: merely a thought of mine-
social and cultural programming drives a person inward toward self. There are no answers there.

Strange you say society drives a person inward...

I observe the exact opposite, and certainly all of my questions have been fulfilled by venturing within.

 

[wil]

Yes, answers are found within...

society drives people without....cars, houses, video games, better jobs, egos boosted, more TVs, paid radio, more channels, more junk, more stuff....look at the number of storage spaces....size of homes today vs 50 years ago....

Society feeds the ego, tells us it is required...ignores and eschews inward contemplation....

there is a power within each of us far greater than anything that exists outside of us....

 

[Aupmanyav]

We have to worship contentment, Indian religions do that. Actually hindus even have a Goddess of Contentment - Santoshi Mata. Indian society built that up during many milleniums of its existence. The saying goes - 'Sabse bara dhan, santosha dhan' - greatest wealth, contentment.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

We have to worship contentment, Indian religions do that. Actually hindus even have a Goddess of Contentment - Santoshi Mata. Indian society built that up during many milleniums of its existence. The saying goes - 'Sabse bara dhan, santosha dhan' - greatest wealth, contentment.

Can contentment come through worship of it?

To worship, you place it above you, you make it unattainable because subconsciously you find yourself unworthy of it...

You must not strive if you wish to attain, you must BE it.

Attainment is this easy, because there was never anything to do, we only create paths to see what was there all along.

Do not create a distance from what you are.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

The very striving creates the belief that it isn't already here.

 

[Paladin]

Yes, answers are found within...

society drives people without....cars, houses, video games, better jobs, egos boosted, more TVs, paid radio, more channels, more junk, more stuff....look at the number of storage spaces....size of homes today vs 50 years ago....

Society feeds the ego, tells us it is required...ignores and eschews inward contemplation....

there is a power within each of us far greater than anything that exists outside of us....

And so it is. However, I find it ironic that humans may have developed the pre-frontal cortex due to social pressures. From an evolutionary standpoint this means our human brain, the one that allows us to contemplate in solitude evolved in direct proportion to the size of our social groups (Goleman, 1998).

 

[NiceCupOfTea]

Maybe there really is a God, who really knows.

 

[AdvaitaZen]

Maybe there really is a God, who really knows.

God is a concept, a thought, a set of definitions we have combined in our minds and chosen whether to believe or not. We are told God is love, and we are told God is one, these both point at something very real but not something that can be worshipped, for to worship it is necessary for there to be two, and thus we fall back.

God is not other, it is the fullness of consciousness, consciousness which is not limited to the form or mind of an individual - rather these are part of that. Yet, it is also beyond consciousness, for there is something there even in deep sleep when we have no consciousness which permits us to be aware of sounds and wake up. Finding out what this is, this is the purpose of religion, but belief will always get in the way of this discovery, you have to be honest enough to understand you don't know anything for sure. Only in this will you permit the possibility of something new to present itself to you...

The word "God" does not exist though, nothing you can read exists exactly as you will imagine by the words. This is why I am so adamant about experiential insights rather than belief, they make this all real for you without the need of words, they cause a true understanding which cannot happen by belief alone.

 

[Thomas]

God is not other, it is the fullness of consciousness, consciousness which is not limited to the form or mind of an individual...

All sounds rather anthropomorphically conceptual to me.

This is why I am so adamant about experiential insights rather than belief, they make this all real for you without the need of words, they cause a true understanding which cannot happen by belief alone.

Does this not contradict the point above? Experiential insight is necessarily limited to sensible or intellectual forms.

The senses can be fooled, as can the intellect. I would have thought any claim to the infallibility of either is flying in the face of reason and experience.

Also, you are determining God as something which can be experienced. This may be the case in your belief system, but it is not in the Abrahamic Traditions. In Christianity, for example, God transcends the created order, and thus God is beyond forms, be those forms sensible or intellectual.

As regards terms or names, suffice to say God reveals Himself to man, not the other way round (which is why we speak of 'revelation' or 'self-disclosure') and necessarily does so through sensible and intelligible forms, in the first instance.

Man needs forms, he cannot operate without or beyond them, so whilst the rites of this religion or that may seem naive and unnecessary, they are in fact far more 'real' and spiritually efficacious than an intellectual assertion.

But beyond forms he needs faith. Without faith, nothing is possible.

 

[wil]

Maybe there really is a God, who really knows.

Oh, this nontheistic Christian believes in G!d....just not the G!d of old belief...not the G!d I was told about in Sunday School. In my youth I lived in AZ, NV, NJ and MD and went to Lutheran, Presbytarian, Baptist, and Methodist churches, as well as Young Life and attended functions with and hung with my Catholic friends. I don't believe in the vengeful G!d that demands worship and is keeping track of who is headed to heaven or hell, don't believe in the devil or the fictitious afterlife locations either...

That belief in G!d is dead to me....I don't believe in an entity made in man's image.

 

[NiceCupOfTea]

Oh, this nontheistic Christian believes in G!d....just not the G!d of old belief...not the G!d I was told about in Sunday School. In my youth I lived in AZ, NV, NJ and MD and went to Lutheran, Presbytarian, Baptist, and Methodist churches, as well as Young Life and attended functions with and hung with my Catholic friends. I don't believe in the vengeful G!d that demands worship and is keeping track of who is headed to heaven or hell, don't believe in the devil or the fictitious afterlife locations either...

That belief in G!d is dead to me....I don't believe in an entity made in man's image.

I understand Wil, but if your mind is open then that vengeful God is certainly a possibility is it not ?

I mean who knows really ?

 

[Thomas]

... if your mind is open then that vengeful God is certainly a possibility is it not?

Depends what it's open to, I would have thought?

I would say a correct reception of Biblical doctrine on the one hand, and a reasoned reflection in light of the Western Philosophical (and Hermetic) Traditions on the other, rule out the notion of God as 'vengeful'.

I think the 'core' question is that of theodicy — if God is good, why is there suffering?

The Book of Job addresses the question head-on, and the Holocaust has had a significant impact on Jewish thinking on this question, to the nuanced position of rejecting the question altogether. How can we know we have sufficient data to ask the question in the first place, even armed with the data of Revelation?

I further think there is fruitful space for dialogue (which I'm sure has occurred) between Christianity and Buddhism. The latter states that suffering is caused by man's attachment to the world, which is summed up quite nicely in Scripture by the phrase "And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat" (Genesis 3:6). By 'woman' I would read the symbolic position of that element in the person which is traditionally identified as feminine – the soul, and by extension, the interior faculties.

In the traditional literal reading, the woman is created as a companion for the man, but he is her 'superior' and Scripture does not present a completely equal relationship. Yet in the Fall, she plays the principle role of making the decision, and the man accepts her decision, as he does the fruit. So we can read that, despite being warned by God not to touch the fruit, she does, because it appears to her as a good, it is 'fair' and 'delightful'.

Irenaeus (d.202AD) thought evil as necessary for human development. Irenaeus argued that creation in the image, then the likeness, of God, is a two-step process. The image consists in having the potential to achieve moral perfection, whereas the likeness of God is the actual achievement of that perfection.

To achieve moral perfection, humans must have free will. To exercise that will, as a matter of free choice and self-determination, humans must experience God at an 'epistemic distance' – a distance of knowledge – how can one be free with God breathing down one's neck? It's unlikely anyone would eat the fruit they had just been told was fatal to eat, if the person who told then so happened to be God, and happened to be standing there at that moment.

So the interior senses, the spiritual senses, were beguiled by the fruit.

The potential for evil must exist if one's choices at this epistemic distance are truly free. If the only decisions man can make are those that adhere to divine ordinance, then there can be no evil. Irenaeus believed evil exists to allow humans to develop as moral agents.

Augustine (d.430AD) refines this argument by proposing evil does not exist as such, that is, it has no ontological origin and source of evil in God. It has no ontological origin at all, except in an error of the intellect. Evil then is not something, it is the absence of something – the good. Evil only exists in a negative sense, as a privation (or corruption), of essential goodness. Thus he argues that man is created good, 'very good', according to Scripture, but chose to pursue his own good contrary to the good willed for him by God.

As the 'path of goodness' leads to God, the 'path of evil' leads to an end which Christ typified by the imagery of Gehenna. Not so much souls burning in some fiery pit, tormented by various demons, but souls which are 'cast out' and no longer have a place in the reality of things. Such a soul becomes impoverished by pouring out itself into something which does not exist, a metaphysical, or metaphorical, black hole.

Such a soul is destined to diminish, to wither and die, as their ontological goal lacks truth, reality, being ... it's the final law of entropy, if the soul invests itself in something which is, in reality, nothing, then the soul cannot sustain itself, it cannot live on nothing ... so it dies.

My own view, for what it's worth, is whilst the Abrahamic God is not a deus absconditus, we cannot make God the micro-manager of every little thing that happens. The Old Testament tends to view God as someone orchestrating human affairs according to how good or naughty people are: when Israel is good, it flourishes; when Israel is naughty, it suffers. This is pretty much what the Mesopotamian world thought, in those days, the gods being more or less capricious creatures who regard man as nothing more than the instrumnent of their shenanigans. Across the region, man was essentially a plaything or puppet, a medium through whom the gods expressed themselves, for good or ill.

I think Christ radically opposed this view. God does not reward/punish people with random acts of fate ... to me Christ is saying "I am with you" — yes, we live in a fragile world of contingency, and yes, 'shit happens', but the idea of Genesis as history is something we must get away from. So also the idea of 'escaping' the world. Here is where we are. Here is where we act with concrete effect. We may act towards a faith and hope in an unseen end, but to say that the here and now does not exist is an error, something I think both Christianity and Buddhism refutes.

Here we must act towards the greater good, however we perceive that to be. Whilst all the evidence, and our every sense, seems to tell us that we cannot be perfect, we strive for perfection.

If we accept and justify vengefulness in God, we must do so in ourselves, and yet everything we know tells us that revenge is wrong: "Revenge is mine" says the Lord in Deuteronomy 32:35, and Paul repeats this, as does the author of Hebrews. But God is not vengeful, God is love, we are told. So what we perceive as vengeance is really justice.

When looked at this way, the tragedies of the world can hardly be perceived as 'justice'. So we must allows that such things happen, war, disease, famine are the inescapable realities of finite existence, on a national as well as a personal scale. Christ is not here to 'magic wand' the nasty things away; Christianity is not an insurance policy or a security blanket.

Christianity is a way of being, in this world and in the next, indeed, in any world. A disposition of the self.

Vengeance never comes into it.

 

[wil]

Oh Thomas....if it were only so... growing up stateside is like living under a despot with an iron fist...

My way or the highway... need something...pray to G!d, if'n you held your tongue right and danced right, and bowed right and done right, "he'll" "hear" your prayer and gladly micromanage for that is what "he" "does"

He also smites New Orleans with floods and oily water for all them there sinners down dere...

Vengeful...you bet...to hell with ya all....if you don't 'fear'.....

we disagree....but we are on the same page here my brother....


And ya NCoT, I'm largely agnostic...I don't know, but I don't believe either.... I work in practiacallity...

 

[AdvaitaZen]

All sounds rather anthropomorphically conceptual to me.

A synonym for anthropomorthic is personification.

We have made ourselves a person, which is only a collection of thoughts.

Can we be our thoughts?

Does this not contradict the point above? Experiential insight is necessarily limited to sensible or intellectual forms.

The problem with sensibleness is that it is based on an idea developed by our society, it is utterly arbitrary and thus not useful. The same is true of intellectual conclusions, we can rationalize anything, for it is only a collection of thoughts, ideas and seem true to our mind.

These are connected to why I disagree with calling it anthropomorphic, it is more thoughts on thoughts. Of course, the moment I try to express this, for you it is conceptual because you don't know what I actually mean, you only have a concept based on my words.

This is the problem all enlightened ones have had.

The senses can be fooled, as can the intellect. I would have thought any claim to the infallibility of either is flying in the face of reason and experience.

Exactly.

I am not speaking of either though, I am speaking of that which all appear for.

The Kingdom of God is within, thoughts and sensations are external to you, for you are aware of them.

Also, you are determining God as something which can be experienced. This may be the case in your belief system, but it is not in the Abrahamic Traditions. In Christianity, for example, God transcends the created order, and thus God is beyond forms, be those forms sensible or intellectual.

Jesus has said he and the father are one, the only difference is that for you this makes Jesus special, and yet then what was the point of his teaching? He has died on the cross because he refused to deny that he was one with God, for me you do him a great injustice to deny your own divinity.

Of course it isn't yours, it is the you which is veiling it, and is subject of the apocalypse - to unveil, to remove the ego.

As regards terms or names, suffice to say God reveals Himself to man, not the other way round (which is why we speak of 'revelation' or 'self-disclosure') and necessarily does so through sensible and intelligible forms, in the first instance.

I agree it does not come from the ego, you cannot will grace.

Whether it comes from outside us or simply from this removal of personal will is not worth debating. The entire concept rests on two, rests on the notion we are somehow lacking at any time, it was all just our delusion.

Man needs forms, he cannot operate without or beyond them, so whilst the rites of this religion or that may seem naive and unnecessary, they are in fact far more 'real' and spiritually efficacious than an intellectual assertion.

Neither ritual nor intellect can help.

Until you realize you can do nothing but surrender all that you are, nothing can be done. You must be willing to sacrifice yourself, carry your cross, so that the divine can take you over. And yet you realize there was never any you, there was always only the divine playing a game with itself - what the Hindu's call leela.

But beyond forms he needs faith. Without faith, nothing is possible.

Faith is the acceptance of an idea, I would say it is exactly faith which makes experiencing the divine impossible.

The problem is that ego has decided to believe, but it is ego which must be surrendered.

Instead of seeing through the ego, you have strengthened it.

 

[Thomas]

Oh Thomas....if it were only so...

I hear you.

we disagree....but we are on the same page here my brother....

Amen to that.

 

[Thomas]

A synonym for anthropomorthic is personification.[/quite]

We have made ourselves a person, which is only a collection of thoughts.
Can we be our thoughts?

Oh, huge question!

Well, they are our thoughts, they are the product of who and what we are – or understand ourselves to be, which I admit, indeed would insist, is an open question.

To think a thought is to make it mine, or make it me, as it is 'wired' into the brain and mind. There are those thoughts we reject.

But control of thinking, can we be our thoughts, or think only what we think, is a discipline that needs to be learnt. Insight is an art. It is the goal of meditation, of contemplation, of prayer.

But it is ultimately complex: Even the most intelligent people can be profoundly unwise, even stupid, at times.

So I would say no. There's nature and nurture; semi-conscious and unconscious.

But definitions always delineate, and it is axiomatic of the Christian Tradition that human nature, or rather, being human, eventually transcends our concepts of the person, because we believe the person is open to the infinite.
Cogito ergo sum, Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" is rejected by Christianity as just that, too limiting on the person. Rather we say "I am a being that thinks".

A being that recognises itself as a 'who' as well as a 'what'.

The problem with sensibleness is that it is based on an idea developed by our society, it is utterly arbitrary and thus not useful.

Agreed, although within any society are always those who seek to explore and understand those boundaries. Thus we have visionaries in every field.

But the senses as such are prior to sensibilities, and shape and inform them. It's sensible to come in out of the rain, or not put one's finger in the flame. That we've learned by experience.

Living the 'good life' is a concept, and what that comprises is an intellectual construct, but it is nevertheless a rational, reasonable and a viable construct, according to our experience of the world in which we find ourselves. Democracy is a good idea. So is socialism. Everything around us is ephemeral, is finite and contingent. 'Putting something away for a rainy day' is eminently sensible. Of course, one man's concept of 'the good life' and what he seeks to store up for tomorrow can differ remarkably from another's.

Our ideas manifest some of the noblest acts of being human, whilst, tragically, encompass the most base.

The same is true of intellectual conclusions, we can rationalize anything, for it is only a collection of thoughts, ideas and seem true to our mind.

But what else can we do? We cannot live in intellectual darkness. It is axiomatic to our nature to search for our limits, even when we say our possibilities are limitless. Our most penetrative insights, your knowings of enlightenment and mine, seem true enough to us.

I am not arguing that your insight or enlightenment is false, only that your estimation of mine seems to impose a limit that is not actually the case.

As Socrates said: "Know thyself", and as Shakespeare advised Hamlet, "to thine own self be true."

These are connected to why I disagree with calling it anthropomorphic, it is more thoughts on thoughts. Of course, the moment I try to express this, for you it is conceptual because you don't know what I actually mean, you only have a concept based on my words.

Because one is trying to express the inexpressible? One is trying to definine that which transcends definition?

That will always and inevitably be the case when we discuss things such as this. But that in itself does not preclude discussion.

I remember an excerpt from the writings of Thomas Merton when, travelling in the East, he happened to pass a Sufi. The two men literally walked passed each other, but exchanged a glance, and in that moment both realised that the other had 'touched' it, had an indefinable sense of it, a knowing of it, but a knowing that could not be communicated in words.

The Kingdom of God is within, thoughts and sensations are external to you, for you are aware of them.

By so saying, Scripture means look within, but the Kingdom is as much within me as it is within everything else, and everyone else. The Kingdom is within, but I am not the Kingdom. By the same token, my humanity lies within, but I am not the sum total of humanity.

Jesus has said he and the father are one, the only difference is that for you this makes Jesus special, and yet then what was the point of his teaching?

The point of His teaching is that we may be one, as Father and Son are (John 17:11 and 22). Only in Him can we be one, because that is how it is: "And the glory which thou hast given me, I have given to them" (John 17:22). We participate in that glory, it is given to us, it is not ours by virtue of our being. It is not our nature, were it so, it would already be ours and could not be given. Again, "keep them in thy name whom thou has given me" (John 17:11).

Being kept in His name is being kept in Him. He is special because "And he is before all, and by him all things consist" (Colossians 1:17).

for me you do him a great injustice to deny your own divinity.

If I was devine then I would be Omniscient and Omnipotent, Aeternal, Perfect and All-Knowing. I am not, ergo I am not divine. I am open to the Divine, and the Divine is open to me, we meet in the Ground of Being (the urgrund of Eckhart).

Of course it isn't yours, it is the you which is veiling it, and is subject of the apocalypse - to unveil, to remove the ego.

Whether it comes from outside us or simply from this removal of personal will is not worth debating.

That's a flawed premise. I don't think one removes the personal will. Rather, one wills the same thing.

Until you realize you can do nothing but surrender all that you are, nothing can be done. You must be willing to sacrifice yourself, carry your cross, so that the divine can take you over.

No, that's not our experience at all. We call that 'eros', the intoxication and sublimation of the individual. The way of the Christian is 'agape', the way of fellowship. It is a true union.

And yet you realize there was never any you, there was always only the divine playing a game with itself - what the Hindu's call leela.

Why on earth would a God want to do 'play games'? And what kind of God would invent a game in which there was so much suffering.

Faith is the acceptance of an idea, I would say it is exactly faith which makes experiencing the divine impossible.

I would say that rather assumes that the idea is limited in the first place.

It's certainly not what Christianity says.