Religion & Physics. XXIc.

[Nick_A]

Hi Omar

You’re a tough cookie.

I agree that science concerns itself with the how’s and not the whys. This is its domain. but for a person to be truly educated in the sense of “understanding” is the how sufficient by itself? I say no which is what makes the essence of religion necessary. Notice what I am saying. I am speaking of the "ESSENCE"of religion, not secular degradation.

Besides, I keep pointing it out, you’re seeking that which shall never be because of the very nature that defines us. We are mortal, finite, fallible etc. It is only by an error that we become immortal, limitless and infallible. It is by an error, by a simple folly, and praise be to folly, that we answer every Why.

How do you know it is an error? what proof do you have? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that if the universe has a purpose and man has an associated purpose within it, you do not know what it is?

Technology is a tool. It cannot be an aggressor. It is like a gun. A gun is a tool and regardless what Liberals think, by itself it is lifeless so cannot be considered good or bad.

One of the main features of man’s being is suggestibility. He has a dominant artificially acquired sense of self that furthers its dominance through artificial means to justify its dominance. So through this suggestion and appeals to a false pride and vanity that furthers this artificially created self, man is further separated from the deeper psychological needs of his being. In all fairness it requires a separate thread to go into the profound explanations of all this.

So when you write: “but we have immaterial needs that technology does not hide, but supplements perfectly,” I consider the bulk of these needs as artificially acquired through suggestion and our dependence on them denies the experience of the reality of ourselves without these fascinations

Anyone who truly understands this and human “being” as relative in quality within an objective scale of “being” will have to be religious in the essential sense.
O- I put value in a human life, above the life of say, a chicken. But that does not by necessity makes me religious but carnivorous.

I am not speaking of the relativity of human being to something else like a chicken but to itself. I have read that the difference in scale of levels of human being is greater than the difference for example between an animal and a plant. When the ancient traditions speak of re-birth, they are referring to this change or evolution of being.

This is something that has always amazed me. Atheists have no trouble accepting the concept of evolution even though it has not been proven. Yet when it comes to man’s conscious evolution beyond the limits of man’s being on earth which is the ESSENTIAL religious calling, most deny evolution insisting that it should be proven. This IMO is classic egotism insisting on the impossibility of nothing beyond their self importance.

But what is a real necessity for the social animal is the ability to communicate. Is that blind egotism? i have yet to find a truly ego-free person.

But what do we communicate? Both Christianity and Buddhism caution about the use of speech explaining various types of harmful speech and of course those for some reason calling themselves Christians or Buddhist violate them all. The question becomes the quality of communication.

I’m not victimizing the consumer but describing the human condition. Our speech is rampant with lies. it is our way. In order to be truly spiritual we must learn to be able to speak the truth. This doesn’t mean that we have to do it all the time since as we are it would cause far more harm than good but only that we are able to do it. But unfortunately we are so caught up in inner lies, we no longer know what it is and cannot separate it from inner lies. It takes a great deal of efforts at self knowledge to admit to our inner lies. But again, if a person wants to seriously begin to understand the “whys” it is necessary to appreciate the nature and hold on us of our inner lies. The ESSENCE of religion seeks the “whys” or knowledge of “being” so part of its purpose is to help us experience inner truth at the expense of the security of our inner lies.

The problem here, seems to me, is not with science or even technology. people can have their lives run by the developments of science but are also capable of using it as a tool. You could be my example. Has technology run your life? Some people are indeed slaves to the latest contraption out of the assembly line, but not others. And why is that? Is it because those that are indifferent to technology, unfazed by it, religious? No. if my life is not run by technology and the artificial needs it proposes to solve (like when they say “Don’t let this happen to you!..”) it is not because I have become spiritual or saw through the difficulties and misuses of science. It could be that I simply cannot afford the things offered, or it could be that I simply prefer a simple life. For example, I don’t have a computer because I am too lazy to maintain security devices and updates that come out yearly. It does not mean that I was religious and resisted technology etc…

But none of this is spiritual. It could be dictated by morality but this is just blind obedience and nothing spiritual about it, You are speaking of mechanics. One set of stimuli will have you reacting one way and another reacting in a different way. As you age hormones change and reactions change not only from societal influences but physiological influences.

The spiritual influence is something different. It is the awareness of being captivated by it or as in the East, they use the word “attached” Normally the meanings of our lives are determined by these unconscious habitual attachments and their gradual changes that govern our daily life. The beginning of the ESSENCE of religion is the feeling that there is something higher than all this. A person feels as if they are doing this and that in life but wonders what are they actually doing? What does it all mean? Science is powerless here. This is the domain of the religious search.

O- See, this is where we have that rub. All the argument before serves only as a wedge to drive in a christian agenda. Left unsaid, however is that entire set of difficulties found in the Christian faith.

But we do not know the Christian faith. Instead we know Christendom or man made Christianity. The trick for the sincere seeker is to rediscover Christianity. That is a whole other topic and one of the reasons Jacob Needleman wrote the book “Lost Christianity.”

The Earth must be to the Christian 6,000-10,000 years old, because if not then the Bible could lie, and if it was untrue about what is simple, what would be the risks that it could be wrong about the complex?

This is another of those things that drive a wedge between reason and faith. What if I told you that the Bible defines life differently than normally supposed. Christ says to let the dead bury their dead. Does this mean a corpse is burying another corpse? Obviously there is a deeper meaning behind this. The life being referred to is human life that has awakened inner knowledge of the Creator. This brings a person to life. I believe that the record of Jesus ancestry that is the cause of concern over the 6,000 years is related to the lineage of esoteric schools that were alive in the biblical sense. So a divide occurs which is totally unnecessary.

Understanding can also be defined as “to be able to reconceptualise, to explain and to use received information”. The essential problem for the religious mind is to determine objectively what that understanding should be or what is the correct understanding, because my understanding of scripture can grossly differ from your understanding of it, so by what criterion do we settle the difference?

Why settle differences. Leave them open. Savor the question. Why not concentrate on developing the ability to understand?

My last U.S.C.F chess rating was 1942. How well do I understand chess? You say that understanding is defined as: “to be able to reconceptualise, to explain and to use received information”. I can do this but does this mean I understand chess? Understanding is relative. Kasparov could see the same complex position I claim to understand and have a far greater understanding. This is more then explaining or reconceptualizing but being able to put the position into a higher chess perspective. So “understanding is relative.” It is the same in life as a whole. True understanding cannot be defined without the concept of perspective yet the concept of perspective as it relates to human “being” and the resultant “understanding” as it blends with knowledge is little valued in the West where so much status is associated with knowledge.

It is the religious folks who put to use these bombs and strap themselves to them due to their overflow of perspective.

Quite true but this is not a reflection of the ESSENCE of religion just as the Spanish Inquisition has nothing to do with Christianity but was only an unconscious reaction of a facet of Christendom. It is perverted essence.

No, I’ve never read Mary Madgley so cannot say anything.

Why do you feel were are fallen?

this is still another thread since it is quite involved and first requires appreciating a scale of being and accepting that being itself is relative as to its closeness to the source. But there was a cosmic reason why Man’s development on earth or natural evolution had to be postponed. But this is something else entirely. Suffice it to say that if you look at the condition of mankind as a whole lacking any sort of inner connection between ourselves, it is not difficult to assert that something went wrong somewhere.

And you call your conclusions scientific? Tell me, from which hypothesis did you start your research?

It comes from my path of esoteric Christianity which includes this type of knowledge that existed back in ancient Egypt and where a lot of Christian ritual like prayers of repetition originated.

Naturally there are those like the the particle physicist Basarab Nicolescu who uses it in his research on quantum physics. I know what he is doing superficially and when he refers to the law of the INCLUDED middle as opposed to EXCLUDED middle it makes sense to me but when he gets into the math or heavy physics, it goes beyond me. But if you want to learn of the law of three forces as it relates to the included middle, levels of reality, and quantum physics feel free to read the following:

nicol.club.fr/ciret/bulletin/b12/b12c3.htm

Just so you know he is not chopped liver:

nicol.club.fr/ciret/biobn/bibnen.htm

[omar]

Hello Nick:
Please forgive the long time to respond.

—You’re a tough cookie.
O- I try to be.

I agree that science concerns itself with the how’s and not the whys. This is its domain. but for a person to be truly educated in the sense of “understanding” is the how sufficient by itself?
O- No, it is not enough, but whatever answer we devise for the why will hopelessly be tied to our subjective, our bias, our prejudice about what ought to be so and so, rather than an acceptance of what is. The blessing of understanding comes to us by leaps of faith, but while for a religion such leaps are commended and are it’s fuel, for science such leaps are seen as poor theoretical work and epistemology.
What is the truth? was the question. The christian as well as most of the theist believe that they have the truth revealed to them. They are simply cruising along waiting for Godot.
For the scientist, no revelation, not that of Newton or even Einstein is beyond questioning. The truly scientific moments are those where the only authority invoked is reason, not John 3:16, where the scientist departs from a tabula rassa state, where he empties his soul of all presumptions and goes on to observe and expects from his effort alone to UNDERSTAND Being.

— How do you know it is an error? what proof do you have? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that if the universe has a purpose and man has an associated purpose within it, you do not know what it is?
O- If The Universe has “a” purpose, not two or three or a billion purposes, then we live in a pretty deterministic universe and all you have said before and the writers you have had me read are wrong. And since when do we have to prove an error?
But suppose that the Universe has a purpose and that I too have a purpose within it, is the knowledge of such purpose within the limits of my reason? Does my reason runs into limitations and blocks on other things, conceptually and empirically? Yes. So if I am limited in other endeavours, less, much less ambitious, such as knowing the weather on a specific day three weeks from now, how am I going to find the theoretical purpose of the Universe and the purpose of not just myself, but of “man” itself?
If you suggest a little religion, then, I take it that, you do also rain-dances?

— One of the main features of man’s being is suggestibility. He has a dominant artificially acquired sense of self that furthers its dominance through artificial means to justify its dominance. So through this suggestion and appeals to a false pride and vanity that furthers this artificially created self, man is further separated from the deeper psychological needs of his being. In all fairness it requires a separate thread to go into the profound explanations of all this.
O- So man is schizzo? He is a walking duality? A combination/mixture of a “dominant”/artificial(how do you know which is the real and which the artificial is left to the imagination) which dominates through, what else, but artificial means; and a Deeper, real, subjected self. I see in this the picture of a man looking himself in the mirror (one of those with the two sides) and imagines that he cast a reflection on the two sides: The one he sees, but the other hidden from view and away, deeper, from the other and decides that this image is the true image, while the one before him, the one he knows and is unambiguously clear and representative-- that self he declares artificial. Please… and then you talk about inner lies etc…

— So when you write: “but we have immaterial needs that technology does not hide, but supplements perfectly,” I consider the bulk of these needs as artificially acquired through suggestion and our dependence on them denies the experience of the reality of ourselves without these fascinations
O- What experience of the reality of yourself do you possess and how does it varies from the fantasy (I guess) of yourself? Further, by what measurement do you separate the two? In all of these activities, have you set a control for the desires of your heart?

— I am not speaking of the relativity of human being to something else like a chicken but to itself. I have read that the difference in scale of levels of human being is greater than the difference for example between an animal and a plant. When the ancient traditions speak of re-birth, they are referring to this change or evolution of being.
O- No matter the rite or the faith that gives you the impression the feeling that you are a different being, that you’ve evolved, the truth might just be that, despite the change, you have not become so different as to merit the same distinction as between a plant and an animal.
Many are those who will say:”Lord, Lord.” And yet did not know Him. Many are those who believe they have changed but haven’t. Many are those keep telling themselves that they have evolved but display the same behavior as the uninitiated. “Sell everything you own and give it to the poor” is the command for the reborn, but who does that anymore? So how are you special? What is your relation to the rest of us? And by what criteria you’ve measured the precise levels of being human.

— This is something that has always amazed me. Atheists have no trouble accepting the concept of evolution even though it has not been proven. Yet when it comes to man’s conscious evolution beyond the limits of man’s being on earth which is the ESSENTIAL religious calling, most deny evolution insisting that it should be proven. This IMO is classic egotism insisting on the impossibility of nothing beyond their self importance.
O- That self importance, as you call, it rest not on the atheist’s but precisely on the religious mind. Death, he thinks, comes to all things and beings but not to the human being, whose egoism is so gigantic that he declares that a finite life is unfair and that his ego must be sustained into eternity. This ego will not allowed itself to be troubled with petty proofs which might limit it.

— In order to be truly spiritual we must learn to be able to speak the truth.
O- No. To be spiritual one only needs a fundamental error.

— The beginning of the ESSENCE of religion is the feeling that there is something higher than all this. A person feels as if they are doing this and that in life but wonders what are they actually doing? What does it all mean? Science is powerless here. This is the domain of the religious search.
O- Very well described. Almost as good in fact as Freud did long ago in Civilization and it’s Discontents. But I say you both forget the old Psalmist:”Fear is the beginning of wisdom”. Fear is the beginning of the religious feeling. What does it all mean? Are you prepared for the bleak alternative to the most blatant inner lie? Could it be that a life that is without meaning causes anxiety? Fear even? And where science fails us, what is left to a man than the sweet comfort of a sweet lie? That is your vocabulary. I say that we simply find meaning, order, by errors of reasoning.

— But we do not know the Christian faith. Instead we know Christendom or man made Christianity. The trick for the sincere seeker is to rediscover Christianity. That is a whole other topic and one of the reasons Jacob Needleman wrote the book “Lost Christianity.”
O- Read Bart Erhman’s “Lost Christianities”. You believe that there is one lost Christianity, when in fact there were many. Like Quantum Physics, we can only pin-point a cloud where what can be called “Christian” should be.

— What if I told you that the Bible defines life differently than normally supposed. Christ says to let the dead bury their dead. Does this mean a corpse is burying another corpse? Obviously there is a deeper meaning behind this. The life being referred to is human life that has awakened inner knowledge of the Creator. This brings a person to life. I believe that the record of Jesus ancestry that is the cause of concern over the 6,000 years is related to the lineage of esoteric schools that were alive in the biblical sense. So a divide occurs which is totally unnecessary.
O- Try this other interpretation. In Adam’s sin we humans find ourselves mortal, that is, dead. Those who want to “live”, are the same as those who want eternal life. If Jesus was indeed the anti-Adam, giving humanity life eternal rather than death, then it makes perfect sense that to Jesus the funeral rites are for those that mourn a life they consider mortal and disbelieve the gospel he brings that his believers shall have eternal life. This is why I kinda wonder about all these cementeries with all their crosses and all the tears; or the people that start a diet of drugs to buy from this earthly life a few more years: Why? When one eternal life awaits you when you loose this life?
Let the dead bury the dead. Those that care so much for death is because they do not yet believe in life and life more abundantly.

— Why settle differences. Leave them open. Savor the question. Why not concentrate on developing the ability to understand?
O- Well, how will we find that “Lost Christianity” you seek?

[Nick_A]

Hi Omar

No, it is not enough, but whatever answer we devise for the why will hopelessly be tied to our subjective, our bias, our prejudice about what ought to be so and so, rather than an acceptance of what is. The blessing of understanding comes to us by leaps of faith, but while for a religion such leaps are commended and are it’s fuel, for science such leaps are seen as poor theoretical work and epistemology.

The goal of the Essence of religion is objectivity at the expense of our natural tendency towards subjectivity. It’s highest meaning IMO establishes the objective relationship between the higher and lower conscious realms.

What is the truth? was the question. The Christian as well as most of the theist believe that they have the truth revealed to them. They are simply cruising along waiting for Godot.

It is one thing to experience a revealed truth and quite another to use it and not lose it to the attractions of our corrupt ego. This will inevitably happen if one just cruises along waiting for Godot.

For the scientist, no revelation, not that of Newton or even Einstein is beyond questioning. The truly scientific moments are those where the only authority invoked is reason, not John 3:16, where the scientist departs from a tabula rassa state, where he empties his soul of all presumptions and goes on to observe and expects from his effort alone to UNDERSTAND Being.

Questioning is fine. The great benefit of spiritual questioning is when it reveals its limits.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit. Simone Weil

This mode of thought, though initially valuable, can take us just so far in our attempts to understand and finally give way… Faith when pure adds the necessary next step.

Matthew 8:

5When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6"Lord," he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.”
7Jesus said to him, “I will go and heal him.”

8The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

10When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. 11I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

13Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that very hour.

Now this has profound esoteric meaning since the real meaning here refers to ones own psychology but even the usual understanding is very revealing. the centurion is an intelligent man. He must have good powers of reason to command with the respect he has. Yet he is aware of its limitation. He intuitively understands the existence of conscious higher intelligence beyond his capacity and asks for help. He has formed this connection of understanding the relationship of higher to lower within his being.

If The Universe has “a” purpose, not two or three or a billion purposes, then we live in a pretty deterministic universe and all you have said before and the writers you have had me read are wrong.

The universe has a purpose. It is a machine that transforms substances within a cosmological scale necessary for the consciousness that created it. It is achieved in accordance with the laws of involution and evolution. Within it things can have a subjective purpose but it is subservient to the higher purpose.

So if I am limited in other endeavors, less, much less ambitious, such as knowing the weather on a specific day three weeks from now, how am I going to find the theoretical purpose of the Universe and the purpose of not just myself, but of “man” itself?
If you suggest a little religion, then, I take it that, you do also rain-dances?

Of course your reason is limited. To understand beyond literal understanding requires one to “know thyself.” This requires a lot of essential religious practice to remain impartial and get beyond our normal tendency towards. preconception.

Man is a microcosmos. As such man is a mini universe containing the scale and relativity of the great universe or cosmos but just smaller in scale. The great religious question here is “Who am I and how can I begin to know myself?” This question is beyond the realm of science.

So man is schizzo? He is a walking duality? A combination/mixture of a “dominant”/artificial(how do you know which is the real and which the artificial is left to the imagination) which dominates through, what else, but artificial means; and a Deeper, real, subjected self. I see in this the picture of a man looking himself in the mirror (one of those with the two sides) and imagines that he cast a reflection on the two sides: The one he sees, but the other hidden from view and away, deeper, from the other and decides that this image is the true image, while the one before him, the one he knows and is unambiguously clear and representative-- that self he declares artificial. Please… and then you talk about inner lies etc…

Quite true. Attempting to draw conclusions about life outside of Plato’s cave from a point of view created within the imaginations of Plato’s cave can not lead to anything. The question again is “how to know thyself” from a perspective outside of the restrictions of cave preconceptions? Science is of no help here because scientific law is the same inside as outside the cave. The attempt to know thyself is not scientific but psychological in the real meaning of the word.

Where science seeks to discover what appears as new relationships, the essence of religion seeks to allow us to remember what has been forgotten within us. The knowledge of being as it relates to above and below cosmologically is already within us. To know thyself is the attempt to get out of our own way in order to remember what has been forgotten in our fascination with the external world.

What experience of the reality of yourself do you possess and how does it varies from the fantasy (I guess) of yourself? Further, by what measurement do you separate the two? In all of these activities, have you set a control for the desires of your heart?

Not that much to brag about but I will say that I’ve had a brief conscious experience of cosmology as well as the personal experience of what St. Paul describes himself as: the wretched Man.

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement. Simone Weil

This is a cosmolological statement. It is witnessing the lower from the perspective of the higher within oneself. I believe I have experienced this but to no where the same degree as Simone. Yet it has had its influence on me.

Many are those who will say:”Lord, Lord.” And yet did not know Him. Many are those who believe they have changed but haven’t. Many are those keep telling themselves that they have evolved but display the same behavior as the uninitiated. “Sell everything you own and give it to the poor” is the command for the reborn, but who does that anymore? So how are you special? What is your relation to the rest of us? And by what criteria you’ve measured the precise levels of being human.

Of course there is a lot of self deception. I am nothing special. I am just one who has smelled the coffee and trying, with the help of otthers, to be on the way to tasting it.

Distinguishing between the seven levels of humanity as I’ve learned it, is not something I can write into a paragraph since it correlates with cosmological scale. One advantage of my path is that it doesn’t allow me to indulge in fantasy and self importance replete in modern religions. It insists on the recognition of our nothingness in relation to the higher context. Can’t get puffed up over that.

This ego will not allowed itself to be troubled with petty proofs which might limit it.

True, but the purpose of the ESSENCE of religion is to heal the ego and enable it to be higher in relation to the lower and lower in relation to the higher or to actualize as the “included middle.” This is its rightful function.

No. To be spiritual one only needs a fundamental error.

The true religious seeker attemts to impartially “know thyself” in order to experience higher meaning and determine if it is an error or not.

Could it be that a life that is without meaning

Yes life attached to habitual earthly patterns has no higher meaning. It is just cyclical responses to natural law. Meaning is found through consciousness which by definition is not restricted to the mechanics of life on earth and our artificially acquired preconceptions. To grow spiritually is to grow consciously. Science has no need for consciouosness but just more mechanical associations.

Those that care so much for death is because they do not yet believe in life and life more abundantly.

I agree that people that preach belief are often more deluded than the person that denies belief since they have witnessed the hypcorisy. I was the same way. However what does it mean to understand life and death?

Simone Weil writes and correlates perfectly with the thread on Fear of God:

“That is why we fly from the inner void, since God might steal into it. It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for effort which causes sin, but fear of God. We know that we cannot see him face to face without dying, and we do not want to die.”
– Gravity and Grace

It is so easy to forget that we live in lies that have become our life that deny our essential selves and its potential. In the presence of higher consciousness, these lies are revealed and we see ourselves free of the psychological restrictions of our personality. Our habitual selves or acquired personality cannot remain in the presence of higher consciousness. Sustained, it means its death and does not want to die. This, as Simone says, is one reason we fear God. It makes it more understandable IMO to replace we with “it” To say that “it” does not want to die reserves a place free of it for the real “we,” our collective selves to experience the light.

Read Bart Erhman’s “Lost Christianities”. You believe that there is one lost Christianity, when in fact there were many. Like Quantum Physics, we can only pin-point a cloud where what can be called “Christian” should be.

There is only one Christianity if one accepts as I do the idea that it is a conscious teaching initiated by a conscious being. From this perspective there can only be one Christianity. All the rest is Christendom or man made interpretations of Christianity

O- Well, how will we find that “Lost Christianity” you seek?

Why do you wish to know? One has to “need” meaning above the ordinary. If one only wants to debate and justify oneself it is useless because the goal of this level of esoteric Christianity is to consciously affirm psychologically as part of the need for meaning. If you are content as is, it is better not to dabble with these things. It is like an enema. If one has concluded that they need to be cleaned out, it can be very helpful. If not, it is only just a pain in the ass.

[omar]

Hello Nick:

— The goal of the Essence of religion is objectivity at the expense of our natural tendency towards subjectivity.
O- No. Our natural tendency is Objectivity. Religion does not differ from a natural mean, but super-sizes it. It has identified that there is a world as-seems and a world as-is-in-itself. While we naturally presume to have a direct objective discourse with the what is, the religious say that we are simply being misled and that instead what we address is an apparent reality and that reality itself lies beyond our senses.
But all said, Nick, this is simply an opinion that cannot be objectified. The object of religion might be the ultimate objectivity but what you arrive at is at a subjective opinion as to what that super-objectivity should be, not some super-objectivity.
-“I seen God”.
– “Very well, now take your medicine Mr. Anderson.”

— Questioning is fine. The great benefit of spiritual questioning is when it reveals its limits.
O- Yet, you show no evidence of this questioning: you have no limits; you declared only assertions on the what is; I have yet to read a sentence from you that says: “it might be…”

Quote:
The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit. Simone Weil

O- Submit? Submit to what? What other than itself…?

— This mode of thought, though initially valuable, can take us just so far in our attempts to understand and finally give way… Faith when pure adds the necessary next step.
O- Indeed. But faith, or Faith, pure or other, is never objective, otherwise it would not be faith at all. Faith adds that next step…it fills the gap; for who? the ego…And because it is valuable to arrive at this step, it is invariably based on self deceptions, error, fantasy, dreams etc, anything so far as we are complete, that is our ego that begs to be complete, that demands that there be no questions left unanswered…it does not matter the certainty of the answer-- in fact, of all the possible answers, the ego selects that which best suits it; the sweetest, and calls it objective, calls it true and there it stops, with his faith in his right-selection.
That is the root of almost all “inner lies”.

Quote:
Matthew 8:

5When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. 6"Lord," he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.”
7Jesus said to him, “I will go and heal him.”

8The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

10When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. 11I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

13Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that very hour.

— the centurion is an intelligent man.
O- You presume he is but the text says nothing about his intelligence and in fact, his intelligence might even be the point, hence the text’s silence about it.

— He must have good powers of reason to command with the respect he has.
O- Command is unrelated to intelligence. Sure it is nice when found in harmony one next to the other, but not a necessary conection. He commands this one to do that, or another to do this, and they do it not necessarly because they think he is intelligent but for other reasons too: Perhaps they fear him, what harm he can do to them, or they obey the position he has been appointed to.
Now what was the point of the passage? The power in the command itself. Notice that Jesus presence is not needed, and this is convenient since after his dead, for the next 2000 years he has been affecting events in absence, but only the centurion’s faith in the Lord’s ability to command a cure. Cure often understood in the ancient times as driving off a devil.
This is not about the centurion being an intelligent being, for the most stupid person could’ve shown the same belief… God seems always to side with the underdog…

— Yet he is aware of its limitation. He intuitively understands the existence of conscious higher intelligence beyond his capacity and asks for help. He has formed this connection of understanding the relationship of higher to lower within his being.
O- In his time, men like Jesus were the doctors of the day (and still are in places of the world today) and miracles, the medicine of the day. The Gods had mediums, secretaries that could be sought for oracles and, yes, even cures. Surely, if you have read Cicero, you would agree with me that the centurion’s behaviour has more to do with the culture of the day, than a superior understanding on his part.

— The universe has a purpose. It is a machine that transforms substances within a cosmological scale necessary for the consciousness that created it. It is achieved in accordance with the laws of involution and evolution. Within it things can have a subjective purpose but it is subservient to the higher purpose.
O- The universe has no purpose. It is not a machine, but simply all that exist, that we could possibly know. The universe is best described as an organism rather than a machine. We don’t even know if a super consciousness created it, a Watchmaker, for while at times it drips with perfection at other times it is imperfect. A girl born without a face is not perfect. So, it is by chance rather than design that the cosmos have produced consciousness, which does not mean that from chaos have come order, which would violate the second law, but that from chaos, chaos remains, but because within it some “hits” (order) are better remembered than the “misses” (chaos), the idea has come to pass in the minds that inhabit 1 planet out of nine, that order rather than chaos is the natural condition of the universe.
Chaos versus Order is a value that differs only in perspectives. That is, the universe is both chaotic and orderly, but only depending from which perspective you admire or observe it.
All that is not to say that I uphold what i just wrote, but that your description of the universe is not the only possible one. Now, since we, here for the sake of the argument, have differing descriptions, the question stands as to which description deals with real and which deals simply with the apparent.

— Of course your reason is limited. To understand beyond literal understanding requires one to “know thyself.”
O- And what would this adventure into the inner regions of my subjective accomplish in relation to the world outside of me? Sybolic understanding? Basically, that is to me, an invitation into self deception. The “literal” is also the “public”, while the “poetic, sybollic, allegorical” is the “subjective”. It is a willful flight from reality, where we are limited, fragile things and into realms were we are, to quote an esoteric christian: “Gods in the making”.

— This requires a lot of essential religious practice to remain impartial and get beyond our normal tendency towards. preconception.
O- It is the hope that you can remain impartial, but only because partiality is a sin of the Objective. So we are back to step one again. We must know ourselves and step beyond literal undersatnding, but whithin the grasp of essential (literal) religious practice. You loosen the spirit only to chain it to different chains.

— Man is a microcosmos. As such man is a mini universe containing the scale and relativity of the great universe or cosmos but just smaller in scale.
O- Yes, yes. That is more like it. Indeed the universe is like an organism; let us name this organism “man”. Is our body not like the universe? Surely. A fine subject. At it best it produces that we call mind, but not necessarly. A body can live (which is not the same as life) and breathe despite the existence of a mind. The mind needs the brain, but the brain does not need the mind. Likewise, we need the universe, but the universe does not need us. If human life was the goal of the universe, why will the sun go supernova someday and consume us? The Earth survived for millions of years without a single human eye looking at it’s sunsets in marvel. And even in islands where no man lives, nature graces it with it’s blessings. Why? Because man is not the point of the universe’s existence. Man is not it’s goal, nor does it need any goal. these “goals” are the creation of ego, our vanity and arrogance, anthropocentric perspective that sees itself and nothing else.

— The great religious question here is “Who am I and how can I begin to know myself?” This question is beyond the realm of science.
O- That is the great religious question? “Who”? No, the great religious question is the “Why?”. “Why do bad things happen?” Why do we have to die? Those are true religious questions-- the questions holy books try to answer.

— Quite true. Attempting to draw conclusions about life outside of Plato’s cave from a point of view created within the imaginations of Plato’s cave can not lead to anything. The question again is “how to know thyself” from a perspective outside of the restrictions of cave preconceptions? Science is of no help here because scientific law is the same inside as outside the cave. The attempt to know thyself is not scientific but psychological in the real meaning of the word.
O- If science is of no help, then why all the huppla over bridging the divide between religion, which can answer this and other questions, and science, which cannot help with an answer?

— Where science seeks to discover what appears as new relationships, the essence of religion seeks to allow us to remember what has been forgotten within us. The knowledge of being as it relates to above and below cosmologically is already within us. To know thyself is the attempt to get out of our own way in order to remember what has been forgotten in our fascination with the external world.
O- This “know thyself” is pretty powerful command with you, but the most noble teaching passed by religions everywhere (and this is important) has been not about knowing thyself, which is a selfish thought, but to know thy neighbor. “Treat others as you yourself would wish to be treated” “Do not do unto others what you do not wish others to do unto you”.
This requires empathy and sympathy, feeling with another and suffering with another.
Know Thyself, is an isolationist prescription. It cuts the self from other selves. The Golden Rule, by comparassion is superior as it is social. The Golden rule is truly selfless and selfish at the same time. Selfless because our self is equated with all other selves. The “I” is lost in the “We”. And selfish because the will to become one with our neighbor is to protect ourselves from one another. It asks that we be civil to one another because that is not always the case. That is our self fearful for itself. But it then turns around and ask us to see ourselves not just as the victims in the hands of others but as the possible agressor as well. Tolerance and harmony follow the will that says “we” instead of “I”, even when it says “we” for the sake of “I”.

I agree that people that preach belief are often more deluded than the person that denies belief since they have witnessed the hypcorisy. I was the same way. However what does it mean to understand life and death?

Simone Weil writes and correlates perfectly with the thread on Fear of God:

Quote:
“That is why we fly from the inner void, since God might steal into it. It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for effort which causes sin, but fear of God. We know that we cannot see him face to face without dying, and we do not want to die.”
– Gravity and Grace
O- Why is it that I do not drive above 65 cruising the Interstate 95? For fear that I might get a ticket. If I did not have that fear, and in Italy I do not, I open the throtle to 100 mph easily. maybe Miss Weil was simply just different than me…

— There is only one Christianity if one accepts as I do the idea that it is a conscious teaching initiated by a conscious being. From this perspective there can only be one Christianity. All the rest is Christendom or man made interpretations of Christianity.
O- From this perspective, then, what you have is nothing but another man-made interpretation to be added onto the machine of christendom. You believe that you have a way to gauge the religious experience of others? If you say “NO”, then how do you know, from all the christianities that developed, which one to pick at that containing the teachings of this conscious being? Notice that I bring religious experience to the forefront, because to me the teaching itself is unimportant. The centralization of His teaching is the machine called Christendom, the work of the canon, the Council and it’s Creed. And now, just like before, you have joined them…
The more things change, the more they stay the same…

O- Well, how will we find that “Lost Christianity” you seek?
— Why do you wish to know?
O- Just a little sarcasm in the response because I thought I saw a contradiction.
Now, I am not trying just to debate for the sake of debate alone, Nick, nor do I simply want to be a pain the arse, as this subject is important to me as well. bob and I have discussed this subject before and that is not due to the pleasure I get in being argumentative. I hope you can recognize that there is an advise in all of this, from me to you as well as I see a counsel from you to me. I am merely willing to hear your position but not as one seeking conversion, but understanding, not just that I understand you but that you understand me and that you understand the difficulties of your position in the eyes of others.

[Nick_A]

Hi Omar

Before answering, How do you distinguish between objective and subjective reason? My guess is that we are far apart but I would have to know what you mean in order to make any sense to you.

I usually include an IMO or “As I understand it” but if I’ve been neglectful I’ll try and include more of them.

My drive is to understand. If I wish to understand chess more, I must play better players. What good is it to only play those I can easily defeat? It only helps my misguided self esteem.

O- Submit? Submit to what? What other than itself…?

We have different qualities of reason. The lowest as I understand it is associative thought since it deals only with duality. Comprehending being requires IMO contemplating the triune universe or based upon the interaction of three forces rather than just the two, yes and no, yang and yin, normal for our associative thought.

Faith adds that next step…it fills the gap; for who? the ego…

Yes, this would be the goal if of course we had an ego free of the imagination that denies it its potential for consciousness. It is the developed ego or the soul of man that would allow for “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” The conscious ego is conscious of the relationship between above and below. The human condition is such that we don’t have an ego but just a home for imagination consumed only with itself and no conscious expansion connecting the above with the below.

Man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness." Simone Weil…Gravity and Grace

How elegant. We use the word wrongly. Ego is our potential which is our greatness and its degeneration into imagination is proof of our wretchedness.

Just so you know, I feature Simone Weil a lot even though I’m more familiar with the ideas she came upon through experience from my path. I do it for several reasons one of which is that she is the only woman that I know of that is equal to if not beyond any of those men featured on the ILP banner. This is natural in most universities as well. I know there are many students and if some are intrigued, papers that include Simone Weil will be very impressive since if the student understands her a bit, it will bring novel ideas to the usual recycled philosophy papers. I also use her because most people that rely on associative thought and frown on faith as ignorant are incapable of dealing with someone like her recognized as so brilliant.

I probably shouldn’t say something like this since her purity took no joy in superficial debate but if she were alive today I would have paid $5oo for a front row seat to a debate between Simone and Richard Dawkins. She would have eaten him up. I know it is not being respectful to her but I cannot help it. I would have had to express an innocent smile.

Cure often understood in the ancient times as driving off a devil.
This is not about the centurion being an intelligent being, for the most stupid person could’ve shown the same belief… God seems always to side with the underdog…

Again, the esoteric psychology in order to be understandable has to be put into a societal framework. The expression “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof” means psychologically to enter his being. The reason the Bible is so hard to understand is, as I’ve come to understand it, is because it is not a historical document but a psychological one. So the 2000 years is meaningless. It’s value is in the “now.”

The universe has no purpose. It is not a machine, but simply all that exist, that we could possibly know. The universe is best described as an organism rather than a machine. We don’t even know if a super consciousness created it, a Watchmaker, for while at times it drips with perfection at other times it is imperfect. A girl born without a face is not perfect. So, it is by chance rather than design that the cosmos have produced consciousness, which does not mean that from chaos have come order, which would violate the second law, but that from chaos, chaos remains, but because within it some “hits” (order) are better remembered than the “misses” (chaos), the idea has come to pass in the minds that inhabit 1 planet out of nine, that order rather than chaos is the natural condition of the universe.
Chaos versus Order is a value that differs only in perspectives. That is, the universe is both chaotic and orderly, but only depending from which perspective you admire or observe it.
All that is not to say that I uphold what i just wrote, but that your description of the universe is not the only possible one. Now, since we, here for the sake of the argument, have differing descriptions, the question stands as to which description deals with real and which deals simply with the apparent.

I marveled when I first read this excerpt from Simone Weil. I can understand her because I am used to this type of deductive reason and observation but she describes it in a way that is actually eerie. How can a young person see with such clarity to write evidencing such experiential understanding? I’ll just post it. It is too beautiful for my cheap comments in comparison. It comes from an essay on “Necessity” I was thinking at some point to begin a thread on the ideas within in this excerpt and in the entirety of the essay. I’m afraid though that it would create too much negativity for our current PC attitudes making discussion impossible. who knows? Anyhow"

…We are warned of the share matter deserves of our love by the beauty of the world. In the beauty of the world, brute necessity becomes the object of love. Nothing is as beautiful as the fugitive folds of the waves on the sea, or the almost eternal folds of mountain scapes.

The sea is not less beautiful to our eye because we know that sometimes ships sink in it. On the contrary, it is more beautiful still. If the sea modified the movement of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a being possessing discernment and choice, and not this fluid that is perfectly obedient to all external pressures. It is this perfect obedience that is its beauty.

All the horrors that are produced in this world are like the folds imprinted on the waves by gravity. This is why they contain beauty. Sometimes a poem, like the Iliad, renders this beauty.

Man can never escape obedience to God. A creature cannot not obey. The only choice offered to man as an intelligent and free creature, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If he does not desire it, he perpetually obeys nevertheless, as a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If he does desire obedience, he remains subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added on, a necessity constituted by the laws that are proper to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for him, while others happen through him, sometimes despite him…

She makes clear here a quote by Meister Eckhart that really annoys people:

“God…does not constrain the will. Rather, he sets it free, so that it may choose him, that is to say, freedom. The spirit of man may not will otherwise than what God wills, but that is no lack of freedom. It is true freedom itself.”

How to follow that?

And what would this adventure into the inner regions of my subjective accomplish in relation to the world outside of me?

“Do You wish to know God? Learn first to know yourself.” ABBA EVAGRIUS, FOURTH CENTURY

As I understand it, the awakening that comes from self knowledge not only brings a new quality of emotion to our interactions with the external world but the beginning of conscious connection with the higher introduces the inner recognition of human purpose and potential. But again the only way to find out is through the courageous attempt to “Know Thyself.”

You loosen the spirit only to chain it to different chains.

Man will always fall under influences. We have to try to choose amongst influences.

"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present…

“…It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good… It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him.”
– Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

She could choose. Her great intellect allowed her to emotionally accept the obvious and “wait”.

O- Yes, yes. That is more like it. Indeed the universe is like an organism; let us name this organism “man”. Is our body not like the universe? Surely. A fine subject.

Agreed. It is an organism that I call a living machine. By living machine I mean interacting with itself unconsciously as opposed to conscious life that profits from its ability to observe the interaction from a higher level.

That is the great religious question? “Who”? No, the great religious question is the “Why?”. “Why do bad things happen?” Why do we have to die? Those are true religious questions-- the questions holy books try to answer.

If you understood Simone’s observations on the beauty of the sea it become plain why chaos exists within perfect order. Chaos is a level of increased lawful interaction that consciousness doesn’t oversee. Life on that level is irrelevant from the conscious perspective. The Christian calling is to make ourselves relevant through re-birth and not just follow the Buddhist cycle of Samsara or The Christian cycle of dust to dust if you prefer.

If science is of no help, then why all the huppla over bridging the divide between religion, which can answer this and other questions, and science, which cannot help with an answer?

Because science does not accept the psychology of the cave. Science and psychology can be complimentary but they are not the same. Science assumes it can bypass psychology. As such it assumes itself essential where it is not.

But man on earth can profit from scientific knowledge in interacting with the earth. Man profits through the ESSENCE of religion through the development of our conscious connection with the higher.

O- This “know thyself” is pretty powerful command with you, but the most noble teaching passed by religions everywhere (and this is important) has been not about knowing thyself, which is a selfish thought, but to know thy neighbor. “Treat others as you yourself would wish to be treated” “Do not do unto others what you do not wish others to do unto you”.
This requires empathy and sympathy, feeling with another and suffering with another.

To the contrary, you cannot really know your neighbor until you know yourself. Otherwise you just imagine your neighbor as you do yourself.

Tolerance and harmony follow the will that says “we” instead of “I”, even when it says “we” for the sake of “I”.

To the contrary, consistent tolerance and harmony can only come to those in whom "I"is not imaginary and through sufficient self knowledge have acquired some objective “will” in contrast to our normal slavery to desires. Otherwise one day we love and one day we hate as well described in Ecclesiastes 3 where there is a time for everything.

From this perspective, then, what you have is nothing but another man-made interpretation to be added onto the machine of christendom. You believe that you have a way to gauge the religious experience of others? If you say “NO”, then how do you know, from all the christianities that developed, which one to pick at that containing the teachings of this conscious being? Notice that I bring religious experience to the forefront, because to me the teaching itself is unimportant. The centralization of His teaching is the machine called Christendom, the work of the canon, the Council and it’s Creed. And now, just like before, you have joined them…
The more things change, the more they stay the same…

We are speaking of different things. It is not a matter of me distinguishing Christianity since it doesn’t exist for me either. Christianity exists outside of the confines of Plato’s cave. I still fall asleep into the cave. The goal is how to grow in order to discern. Who can discern asleep in Plato’s cave. The first thought is towards awakening not for me being a judge. As Simone suggests, it makes more sense to deny God’s presence than to accept blind belief.

Now, I am not trying just to debate for the sake of debate alone, Nick, nor do I simply want to be a pain the arse, as this subject is important to me as well. bob and I have discussed this subject before and that is not due to the pleasure I get in being argumentative. I hope you can recognize that there is an advise in all of this, from me to you as well as I see a counsel from you to me. I am merely willing to hear your position but not as one seeking conversion, but understanding, not just that I understand you but that you understand me and that you understand the difficulties of your position in the eyes of others.

I am the same. I appreciate becoming aware of different perspectives. I have no intent on conversion. I’ve never discussed my path on this site and never will because since it exists as an organic whole it has to be presented as such from all sides and not just arguing over details out of context.

Of course I know the difficulties of my position. But having become aware of the great minds through which I’ve derived some incredible ideas and a perspective I would find horrible to be again without as in my youth, it is not important.

It is like Columbus having thought the world was round but those around him were rolling on the floor in hysterics. Did it bother him? It is the same with cosmology. It adds an additional dimension to understanding the universe and man within it in a profound and precise meaningful way. It seems idiotic for those used to reasoning from the perspective of one cosmos. So all the righteous indignation for thinking such things doesn’t bother me. I’m just interested in what makes sense, and human meaning and purpose. Part of learning is in dialoging with those that disagree with me.

[iman]

i feel like to thank Omar for his sensible compassy i know that i think too much my feelings to be because i cannot accept to know from what i won’t feel, nobody is like me for this and i am the one to blame as i know my nothing when i see God and it is too much ego’s will to insist on understanding and think what to express in behaviours only this way, thank you also for giving me a little of the credibility in truth of that way, it is obvious that when you use your smart brain only to think some fears you look honest true lover of souls needs, and this is the issue of God is to make you see his love in the profound sense of needing.

Nick it is not an issue at all a debate on the contrary your love to that lady will show more if you hope for her to say God freely without having a strong mind in being outside the truth to confront, also fo you watch your pur love to be, don’t coufuse it with the pur love to not be of God, regarding Him what do you really feel His concerns of giving a soul words to say to unsensitive one in means?
last interaction with you wish, myself, please don’t think i am jalous of her i am nothing but a will of God love and a God will to say His soul…

[omar]

Hello Nick:
Objective reasoning, for one, is inappropriate for our current goal, I feel, because what is objective relates to an object, something material, and also an aim at being uninfluenced by emotions and free from bias. That which is subjective is personal and tied with how we feel about an idea much more than an external object. For example, my description of a mailbox can be quite objective, while my description of justice or love has to be subjective.
God is observed subjectively, from a personal experience. We can share that experience and try to objectify it, but we inevitably reduce it and present only a facsimile, that then must be internalized by yet another mind subjectively, because all that is received is a string of ideas, that is, language.
Love exist; Justice too, but their being is diverse from a mailbox. But that is the danger of it all. Is God but an idea in our minds? Another question to the believer is why must God be more than an idea? If God shared a quality with the mailbox, in that they are both outside of us and our minds and are objects that are sensible, does God gain or lose prestige? The fact that these questions are even possible proves the subjectivity involved in our discussion. If the matter was about a public object, we would stop at the point when our finger cross his pierced hands. And if the Son was here, would we not still ask about the Father? Yes, until we felt the thunder in the mountain… Or would we?
There is no escaping the subjectivity of it all, when the subject is God. Faith cannot be objective. The same experience can turn one of us into a believer and leave the other untouched. Really, I realize now, that is all I needed to say…
As to the qualities of reason, I can imagine many but also less than some others might thing. The trick here is that there are divisions that are evidently arbitrary. For example you say:
“We have different qualities of reason. The lowest as I understand it is associative thought since it deals only with duality.”
But Hume said:
“All kinds of reasoning consist in nothing but comparison, and a discovery of those relations, either constant or inconstant, which two or more objects bear to each other.”
That is to say that what you considered the lowest, might be the most essential quality. Perhaps you mean “lowest” in the same way, but that does not seem to be the case. You seem to consider that this lowest quality is lowest because it simply weights between two things. Higher than this is a reasoning which weights on a triune set.
Here is how I feel about it.
In judging three, 1- yes, 2- no, 3- maybe, Ying, Yang, Yao etc, your mind is built to compare all three. Having the extra option does not change the character of reason, but simply gives reason more subjects to compare.
Quote:
Man would like to be an egoist and cannot. This is the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness and the source of his greatness." Simone Weil…Gravity and Grace

I always weary about Tyrants that try to speak for “man”, or “mankind”. How difficult it seems for any of us to simply say: “I would like to be an egoist and cannot….” We hide in that imaginary whole that shares our grief or joy. But I am sure she meant well (of course I do not feel sure but repeat her error to flesh out the point). I think I can agree with here to a point. Someone once said that “We can love everybody as long as there are enough people left to hate”. I keep finding counter intuitive statements to be revelatory. The cohesiveness of the in-group follows it’s sharp idea of an out group. Case in point: The ancient Israelites.
Quote:
Cure often understood in the ancient times as driving off a devil.
This is not about the centurion being an intelligent being, for the most stupid person could’ve shown the same belief… God seems always to side with the underdog…

— The reason the Bible is so hard to understand is, as I’ve come to understand it, is because it is not a historical document but a psychological one.
O- What difference is there then between Greek Mythology and Christianity? I said this to Bob too. Regardless of your esoteric opinions, the Bible itself cannot be proven beyond doubt to be in it’s entirety a psychological document. I said that to Bob too. In some places, I agree, the above is true, but it cannot be said to be true of the whole Bible.

Quote:
The sea is not less beautiful to our eye because we know that sometimes ships sink in it. On the contrary, it is more beautiful still. If the sea modified the movement of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a being possessing discernment and choice, and not this fluid that is perfectly obedient to all external pressures. It is this perfect obedience that is its beauty.

All the horrors that are produced in this world are like the folds imprinted on the waves by gravity. This is why they contain beauty. Sometimes a poem, like the Iliad, renders this beauty.

Man can never escape obedience to God. A creature cannot not obey. The only choice offered to man as an intelligent and free creature, is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If he does not desire it, he perpetually obeys nevertheless, as a thing subject to mechanical necessity. If he does desire obedience, he remains subject to mechanical necessity, but a new necessity is added on, a necessity constituted by the laws that are proper to supernatural things. Certain actions become impossible for him, while others happen through him, sometimes despite him…

Let me comment on the first paragraph:
We possess no perfect obedience. In fact we are disobedient. It is that disobedience that is the source of our sadness and with it our humanity. Man, despite being a creator, is also a creator. We possess a mind that has imagination. The beauty of a hurricane is lost to a survivor of Katrina. The calmness of breeze cannot erase the fear of the storm. What is the beauty of death? That would be my question to her. We find beauty in the sea, generally, because it’s danger touches only a minority; but what of that which touches us all? Is Death beautiful?
Third paragraph:
This question is about whether we have freewill or not. Miss Weil would seem here to deny the existence of choice. But is she and other like her, right in focusing on the relation of man to God and completely ignore the relation of man to everything else besides God? A General has to answer to the Secretary of Defense, but the Lieutenant must answer to the General. Man is both creature and creator, nothing is more clear, and it is our ability to create that makes us truly sons of the Old One.
The choice she offers this creature she imagines man to be is really no choice at all. Desire is an emotion, a passion. It is not something, if it is a true desire, that I can choose. Suppose that you love someone. That she is the object of your desire. Could you choose not to desire her? You could ignore the thug from your heart, but that does not mean that the desire is gone but that you ignore it’s call because you are simply incapable to truly choose not to feel desire.
If a creature cannot not obey then it does not make sense to also refer to it as a “free” creature. What is certain is that the outcome of these supposed choices, and in my view, non-choices, is an equal objective impotency that can only seem to be aided by an inner lie, or as I say, an error.
As for Meister Eckhart, we can place him next to the Franfurter and also Martin Luther. The case they present, is consistent with Weil’s, is about the Bondage of the Will. The consequences of their thoughts merit a new tread, but suffice to say, the hegemony of God’s will renders, in my opinion, His mercy as false, His judgment as an impeachment againt Himself. No dialogue is possible, only a monologue.
Quote:
And what would this adventure into the inner regions of my subjective accomplish in relation to the world outside of me?

Quote:
“Do You wish to know God? Learn first to know yourself.” ABBA EVAGRIUS, FOURTH CENTURY

That does not answer my question. Dear Mr. Abba; How do I get to know God by knowing myself better? Seems to me that the result of getting to know myself better is that I know myself better. What is next? If I wish to know a person, his likes, his dislikes, character etc, I must first know myself. Perhaps what is meant is that this is the first step. But then, after getting to know yourself better, much better, you come back with the same desire still of wanting to know God. Now what?
Let’s us now look at the Bible and a new perspective there. A man comes to Jesus who wishes to earn God. His given command is to do what the Law set before him Commands. He has done it all! Really? The two major commandments are to Love God with all your heart mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself. If you are rich how can you say you’ve followed either command? First sell everything you own…you know the rest. What I wish to illuminate by this is that in the original Law the quality of your inner knowledge is not an issue. After Jesus this condition has not changed. Again, the important feature is what you do with those outside, not what you have come to know within you.
I say to those who wish to know God to act like Him. The child learns by imitating it’s parent. Yet this is not an easy thing to do, and after 2,000 years “Christians” still kill one another and poverty prevails no matter what “true” Christianity is around.

Quote:
"To believe in God is not a decision we can make. All we can do is decide not to give our love to false gods. In the first place, we can decide not to believe that the future contains for us an all-sufficient good. The future is made of the same stuff as the present…

“…It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good… It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him.”
– Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

This is deep and worthy of another breakdown. First, I agree with her that it is from a sense of lack that God, the ultimate boom, contradicts. God is necessary, it seems, because the world is not perfect. It is also true that this sense of lack is also the motivation by which murder emerges.
Notice also that where before we were talking about the quest to know ourselves as indispensable, now all of the sudden, it is not needed. What gives? Of course, like her, I don’t believe that this “Know Thyself” gets you very far at all with God. In fact, it is not about knowing; that is why it is not something we seek. We seek because we have already found what we now tell reason to find. Think of what the Oracle tells Neo in the second Matrix: He has already made the decision, but now he wants to understand that decision. Or as Hume put it: Reason is a slave to the passions. It has been my experience, in talking with Christians, that their reason for being Christians, generally, has nothing to do with what they have reason. That “Oceanic Feeling” that Freud identified cannot be adopted, but is inherited or not. I cannot reason that I am full in my stomach, when I am feeling hungry.
— If you understood Simone’s observations on the beauty of the sea it become plain why chaos exists within perfect order. Chaos is a level of increased lawful interaction that consciousness doesn’t oversee.
O- Yes, I agree. It is a matter of perspective. Where we disagree is in the sense that my perspective cannot inform me as to the what “is”. If I perceive order, that does not mean that overall the universe itself is not inherently chaotic. If I perceive chaos, that does not mean that the universe itself is not actually perfectly Ordered.
— To the contrary, you cannot really know your neighbor until you know yourself. Otherwise you just imagine your neighbor as you do yourself.
O- I do the same regardless. When I know myself better, I still cannot know another mind, but imagine it. We are, because of our biology, limited to know only our own mind. We can imagine, but other minds are not objects to our senses. We cannot read minds. Or do you…?

— But having become aware of the great minds through which I’ve derived some incredible ideas and a perspective I would find horrible to be again without as in my youth, it is not important.
O- Fear is the beginning of wisdom…

[Nick_A]

Hi Omar

Actually your impression of a mailbox is not objective since a mailbox itself is a cultural creation. Objectively it is just a grouping of matter.

Objective thought is something different; it is consciousness of self. It is seeing oneself from a higher perspective. This quality of consciousness is pure affirmation. It does not include a comparison. Unless you’ve worked on these things it is impossible to describe. It is alluded to in the Gospel of Thomas:

(3) Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

This is profound psychology. It is that aspect of our collective selves capable of the conscious experience of oneself, the higher consciously observing the lower, that in turn is capable of being known from above

This quality of affirmation is objective reason. It takes place along the “vertical” line of being, above to below, in contrast with our normal associative reason that compares on the same level along the horizontal line of knowledge in comparison.

Simone’s observation here is an allusion to objective reason:

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

I’m awed by how this simple way expresses such a profound idea. It is only through a conscious connection of pure affirmation, “seeing,” that this can take place objectively. It is relative unity witnessing being manifesting at a level of greater diversity which objectively is defilement.or a lessening of the quality of being in relation to the source of being. Simply elegant.

Omar, there is a law that I am familiar with that states that "the higher can understand the lower but the lower cannot understand the higher. Just from this perspective it is clear why we cannot know God. All we can do is move closer; lessen the distance of our being to the source through a qualitative change in our being through self knowledge. This is what ABBA EVAGRIUS is referring to.

In judging three, 1- yes, 2- no, 3- maybe, Ying, Yang, Yao etc, your mind is built to compare all three. Having the extra option does not change the character of reason, but simply gives reason more subjects to compare.

To really explain this right would require preparation. But if you can get a glimpse of what is quoted from the Gospel of Thomas, there is the observed, the observer, and through this relationship the observer is in turn observed. The middle observer is what reconciles the higher (yang) and lower (Yin). its existence is determined by being the intermediary between those two levels of being. It is simultaneously Yin in relation to the higher yang and yang in relation to the lower Yin. This is an example reconciliation as it relates to manifestations or actualizations along the line of being itself. this is what I’ve read which was missing in Kant’s ideas. The “thing in itself” lacked relativity and scale.

I always weary about Tyrants that try to speak for “man”, or “mankind”. How difficult it seems for any of us to simply say: “I would like to be an egoist and cannot….”

But if you consider the human condition as a whole and how it mechanically follows the cycles and everything repeats itself, it seems rather obvious that collectively man is unable “to be.” Do you really believe that conscious humanity could result in what is plain to see in the world? All this happens because Man as a whole reacts unconsciously to cyclical external influences and as such everything repeats.

Do animals in the jungle have choice or is life just happening as animals interact with each other and vegetation? They seem to be doing a lot of things but is anything conscious? Is there a conscious choice in their lives? As I’ve come to understand, it is the same with us. We assume choice where it cannot exist. We are slaves to external influences just like the rest of organic life. Simone is very wise IMO to assert that conscious recognition of this situation is what gives man supernatural possibilities in regards his being. Unconscious human life proceeds mechanically just like the rest of organic life, as a response to external stimuli. This takes a while to get used to since it is shocking and ego deflating.

Because we are as we are, the qualities of our being, life is as it is. This at first is very offensive. Objections about free will and the like arise immediately. It takes a while to get over the usual protests about the value of education and the like. But this is a deep psychology that takes a while to digest. When I began becoming aware of these things I grumbled with the best of them. Yet after a while and with the experiments I participated in both alone and with others, it became clear that it was the case. Simone IMO is more correct than you believe now.

I say to those who wish to know God to act like Him. The child learns by imitating it’s parent. Yet this is not an easy thing to do, and after 2,000 years “Christians” still kill one another and poverty prevails no matter what “true” Christianity is around.

You presume a choice where it doesn’t exist. Acting as a Christian requires the being of a Christian. We live in Plato’s Cave. The being of Christianity is higher, outside Plato’s cave. Imitating is fine to a degree but without something deeper and what Jacob Needleman refers to as “intermediate Christianity,” since we are as we are we lose direction and life continues as in a circle

Notice also that where before we were talking about the quest to know ourselves as indispensable, now all of the sudden, it is not needed. What gives? Of course, like her, I don’t believe that this “Know Thyself” gets you very far at all with God.

This becomes subtle. Simone Weil when very young stumbled onto the ancient practice of the Holy Faculty of Attention. In this way she didn’t imagine herself but coldly experienced life in the raw with a fierce allegiance to truth. For her truth was beyond death so she was unafraid to die to the lie. Essentially this is the seeing of oneself and by law, invited the presence of higher consciousness to fill the void she had created in her psych through this great gift of hers.

The point of all this is again that science can aid the daily life of mankind in linear time and when used properly can nurture our planet. Religion when authentic educates man’s “being” This raises the quality of “now” and promotes understanding of a higher level through conscious awareness. This is what could be but as we are and with all the naive battles over faith and reason, may never be.

[Nick_A]

Hi Omar

Actually your impression of a mailbox is not objective since a mailbox itself is a cultural creation. Objectively it is just a grouping of matter.

Objective thought is something different; it is consciousness of self. It is seeing oneself from a higher perspective. This quality of consciousness is pure affirmation. It does not include a comparison. Unless you’ve worked on these things it is impossible to describe. It is alluded to in the Gospel of Thomas:

(3) Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”

This is profound psychology. It is that aspect of our collective selves capable of the conscious experience of oneself, the higher consciously observing the lower, that in turn is capable of being known from above

This quality of affirmation is objective reason. It takes place along the “vertical” line of being, above to below, in contrast with our normal associative reason that compares on the same level along the horizontal line of knowledge in comparison.

Simone’s observation here is an allusion to objective reason:

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

I’m awed by how this simple way expresses such a profound idea. It is only through a conscious connection of pure affirmation, “seeing,” that this can take place objectively. It is relative unity witnessing being manifesting at a level of greater diversity which objectively is defilement.or a lessening of the quality of being in relation to the source of being. Simply elegant.

Omar, there is a law that I am familiar with that states that "the higher can understand the lower but the lower cannot understand the higher. Just from this perspective it is clear why we cannot know God. All we can do is move closer; lessen the distance of our being to the source through a qualitative change in our being through self knowledge. This is what ABBA EVAGRIUS is referring to.

In judging three, 1- yes, 2- no, 3- maybe, Ying, Yang, Yao etc, your mind is built to compare all three. Having the extra option does not change the character of reason, but simply gives reason more subjects to compare.

To really explain this right would require preparation. But if you can get a glimpse of what is quoted from the Gospel of Thomas, there is the observed, the observer, and through this relationship the observer is in turn observed. The middle observer is what reconciles the higher (yang) and lower (Yin). its existence is determined by being the intermediary between those two levels of being. It is simultaneously Yin in relation to the higher yang and yang in relation to the lower Yin. This is an example reconciliation as it relates to manifestations or actualizations along the line of being itself. this is what I’ve read which was missing in Kant’s ideas. The “thing in itself” lacked relativity and scale.

I always weary about Tyrants that try to speak for “man”, or “mankind”. How difficult it seems for any of us to simply say: “I would like to be an egoist and cannot….”

But if you consider the human condition as a whole and how it mechanically follows the cycles and everything repeats itself, it seems rather obvious that collectively man is unable “to be.” Do you really believe that conscious humanity could result in what is plain to see in the world? All this happens because Man as a whole reacts unconsciously to cyclical external influences and as such everything repeats.

Do animals in the jungle have choice or is life just happening as animals interact with each other and vegetation? They seem to be doing a lot of things but is anything conscious? Is there a conscious choice in their lives? As I’ve come to understand, it is the same with us. We assume choice where it cannot exist. We are slaves to external influences just like the rest of organic life. Simone is very wise IMO to assert that conscious recognition of this situation is what gives man supernatural possibilities in regards his being. Unconscious human life proceeds mechanically just like the rest of organic life, as a response to external stimuli. This takes a while to get used to since it is shocking and ego deflating.

Because we are as we are, the qualities of our being, life is as it is. This at first is very offensive. Objections about free will and the like arise immediately. It takes a while to get over the usual protests about the value of education and the like. But this is a deep psychology that takes a while to digest. When I began becoming aware of these things I grumbled with the best of them. Yet after a while and with the experiments I participated in both alone and with others, it became clear that it was the case. Simone IMO is more correct than you believe now.

I say to those who wish to know God to act like Him. The child learns by imitating it’s parent. Yet this is not an easy thing to do, and after 2,000 years “Christians” still kill one another and poverty prevails no matter what “true” Christianity is around.

You presume a choice where it doesn’t exist. Acting as a Christian requires the being of a Christian. We live in Plato’s Cave. The being of Christianity is higher, outside Plato’s cave. Imitating is fine to a degree but without something deeper and what Jacob Needleman refers to as “intermediate Christianity,” since we are as we are we lose direction and life continues as in a circle

Notice also that where before we were talking about the quest to know ourselves as indispensable, now all of the sudden, it is not needed. What gives? Of course, like her, I don’t believe that this “Know Thyself” gets you very far at all with God.

This becomes subtle. Simone Weil when very young stumbled onto the ancient practice of the Holy Faculty of Attention. In this way she didn’t imagine herself but coldly experienced life in the raw with a fierce allegiance to truth. For her truth was beyond death so she was unafraid to die to the lie. Essentially this is the seeing of oneself and by law, invited the presence of higher consciousness to fill the void she had created in her psych through this great gift of hers.

The point of all this is again that science can aid the daily life of mankind in linear time and when used properly can nurture our planet. Religion when authentic educates man’s “being” This raises the quality of “now” and promotes understanding of a higher level through conscious awareness. This is what could be but as we are and with all the naive battles over faith and reason, may never be.

[Nick_A]

Hi Omar

I was looking at the “So” thread and read your ideas on eternity. It dawned on me that this belongs here as well since one basic difference between the essence of religion as I understand it and science is in the conception of “Time.” Time is a constant for science but not for the Essence of religion as I understand it. This from “human being” far greater than mine:

“Time in itself does not exist; there is only the totality of the results ensuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in the given place.”

This would take a while to explain and my grasp of the depth of this remark is still superficial in comparison to his quality of understanding. But the important thing I wish to stress from the perspective of being is that time is both relative and repetition.

I’ve read this described in the context of dimensions so I can only give my understanding of eternity. But, I’ll give it a try

The universe IMO has six dimensions. The first three are the length, width and depth of space. We begin with a point that has no dimensions and from this perspective is defined as a “limit.” An infinity of connected points produces a line: the first dimension. An infinity of lines then begin to extend from this infinity of points and perpendicular to it into infinity producing a plane or surface. Again, lines extending vertically from each of these points of the surface and perpendicular to it produces a cube.

Existence isn’t in space but in time. Time is the eternal repetition of a moment. We experience it as a moment in time or a “limit”. The corresponding space is beyond our comprehension as within all the higher dimensions in which time manifests as repetition of moments. This is why we see Man as a surface in relation to the fourth dimension and not the dimensional totality of human being.

However, a person’s life is more than one point or moment but a series of moments in time defined as eternity or the fifth dimension. There are an infinity of possible eternities and each when manifested becomes part of the sixth dimension or all possible eternities.

But from the perspective of science, linear time is the experience of the relationship between individual points in relation to something else and in our case the revolution of the moon around the earth and the earth around our sun.

From the perspective of being, time is measured by the length of continuing repetitions of the moment. For example the manifestations of microscopic life in a drop of pond water measured in repetitions of the moment is much different then for us. It is much quicker. In turn, time natural for the consciousness at the level of our sun is on a much slower scale of repetition. A moment in time for the level of the sun is not comprehensible for us since it includes several generations for Man.

The Christian concept of God as both One and Three simultaneously is incredible for appreciating the existence of the relationship between God as “ONE” and creation as a function of “Three” all manifesting in relation to time as repetition. From this perspective, God does not exist but “IS.” Cycles of existence begin within God as emanations from “ONE” and manifesting into levels of materiality as qualities of “THREE.”

Omar, there may be more to this than you believe to be the case.

Contemplation like this when it moves into second gear so to speak, I believe can drive someone mad which is why I keep it at a minimum for myself. It awakens things that we are not ready for. I think that Nietzsche got too close without preparation and his contemplations on eternal recurrence did him far more harm than good as a result since it was confined to a brilliant but corrupt ego.

[omar]

Hello Nick:

— Actually your impression of a mailbox is not objective since a mailbox itself is a cultural creation. Objectively it is just a grouping of matter.
O- A “grouping of matter” is not relating to anything in specific so it is useless in our discussion. We refer objectively, we relate to objects, by use of names that identify one grouping of matter as distinct from another. Perhaps dirt and the mailbox are in the end the same thing and the distiction is indeed artificial, but it is in our reason to do just this.
When you are out with a child out on the playgrounds sandbox, perhaps, and you point to a dog, the first time you have done this with this child, the child responds as if it is a foregone conclusion that you did not mean the sand in which the dog stood.

— Objective thought is something different; it is consciousness of self. It is seeing oneself from a higher perspective. This quality of consciousness is pure affirmation.
O- So, does this mean that it’s natural opposite, subjective thought, is unconscious? Seeing the self from a lower perspective? And most of all a negation?
If this is so, I do not see how it can be proven or the mechanics of it. Personally, I think that the self is indispensable for thought, period. I believe that it is actually in subjective thought that the self is aware of itself. In objective thought, as when I speak of the particular qualities of the Mailbox, simply assumes the self as evident. To think of something outside of me means that I already have secured the “me” as the light that illuminates the Other (and yet the statement that is made that in doing this I see myself from a higher perspective is a subjective thought). To think of something subjectively, – such as a shame, or a revolting image, or how the mailbox makes me feel (or what me thinking of the mailbox means), or how the sea makes me feel or how a leaf falling on my lap through the crack of a car’s partially open window when my pain is at it’s height, makes me feel-- only serves to focus my self. I am most myself when I think subjectively.
(I want to make clear before I continue that the “self” is just another error we live with, or by. The self is not a unity, we just treat it that way. We change in time, and how we feel about that leaf today might not hold the same always-- this is why love ususally dies. Instrospection into the self is dangerous. Every time we set ourselves to the task to Know our self we simply come to suppose that there is a self total we have found and refer again and again. In fact, the self hides, or is hidden by our effort to fix it. We simply attain knowing our self at this moment in time and if we forget this, and think that we can know our self, we deny in the affirmation of one solid self, the existence of other selfs. The self can only be known, can only be fixed, with our last breath. All other conclusions from introspection, efforts of Knowing Thy Self, is to beg for a style to call one’s own.)
The very option you defend, to know thyself, requires introspection. To know thyself one need not consider a show on television, or study the age of rocks, both of which are incredibly objective, but to meditate, to curve, or recurve, back into the forgotten self that studies rocks and watches television, and looses itself in it’s transaction with things.
I will not comment right now on the Gospel of Thomas. Reason being, we would have to first discuss why you believe that Thomas is a better source of Jesus’ thoughts. We would also have to go more indepth into the meaning of the Messiah from a Jewish perspective. The most essential question I can ask you to answer here is: Why did Jesus have to die?

— Simone’s observation here is an allusion to objective reason:

Quote:
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

O- I don’t understand. Do you believe that Weil equates “Purity” with “objective reason”? But who’s defilement? Hers or another’s defilement?

— I’m awed by how this simple way expresses such a profound idea. It is only through a conscious connection of pure affirmation
O- So “Purity” is “pure affirmation”?

— “seeing,” that this can take place objectively. It is relative unity witnessing being manifesting at a level of greater diversity which objectively is defilement.or a lessening of the quality of being in relation to the source of being. Simply elegant.
O- So as I try to understand both you and her, The affirmation of the self (pure affirmation or simply Purity) comes at the price of it’s own defilement. Or, the ability of creating an idea of an identity, this affirmation, comes from the negative of identifying the Other. This initial unity (Lacan’s Mirror?) has no I. It adquires it’s “I”, by sawing off from itself what is not “I”, which becomes it’s defilement, it’s Other. Do I understand you correctly?
Hmmmmm…
If I am then this would explain much into Abbas statement. But the idea is controversial. Ludwig Freuerbach in his The Essensse of Christianity call for a new theology based on anthropology. What you could be proposing might be closer thatn you would want: To better understand God, the ultimate Other, one must look in the mirror, the unity from which it sprung, as we were once like God: All in All. And became mortals, like Jesus, by identifying the Other, which is what he are not…hmmm…
Trajic in all of this is that God is not our Creator, our Father, but really, is actually our Creation, our Son. Sublime, but still leaves us alone with a fantasy-- a mirror imagine of ourselves we forgot was only us.

Quote:
I always weary about Tyrants that try to speak for “man”, or “mankind”. How difficult it seems for any of us to simply say: “I would like to be an egoist and cannot….”

— Do you really believe that conscious humanity could result in what is plain to see in the world? All this happens because Man as a whole reacts unconsciously to cyclical external influences and as such everything repeats.
O- What we see in the world might also just come from a situation Weil describes:

“…It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good… It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him.”
– Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

The key according to her is not our consciousness. The world sucks because of a lack of perfection and God comes to him that refuses to see the world as perfect. Our unconsiouness is to the lack of perfection and it prevents us from having faith in God: We simply don’t need God, if the world is perfect. Consciousness of the world’s imperfections and a refusal to justify them leads one into a collision course with God. What happens in the world, you told me in the last post, is bound to happen, regardless of our collective presence of mind. The creature cannot not obey…

— We assume choice where it cannot exist. We are slaves to external influences just like the rest of organic life. Simone is very wise IMO to assert that conscious recognition of this situation is what gives man supernatural possibilities in regards his being. Unconscious human life proceeds mechanically just like the rest of organic life, as a response to external stimuli. This takes a while to get used to since it is shocking and ego deflating.
O- What I think is that we can agree in that the state of the universe is not subject to our choice. We are powerless to supply the worlds imperfections by our choices. We have no choice in whether or not it shall rain in Africa today. But I find disturbing to anyone who wants to believe is that the message is clear, that God comes to those who refuse to accept the injustice, the incompleatness of being, the lack. Out of this refusal to obey what is, to resign, he invents a God, a greater other, a greater version of himself that can do all we can, what we feel we should be able to do. It can choose whether or not it rains in Africa. Worse of all, Miss Weil forgot to consider is prayer, which finnaly allows the rebel to justify another day of life, just like brother, who never saw the problem, the lack, the problem that needed a solution; the disease that needed a cure. With prayer, the unquiet, this restless heart, finally affirms creation:
“Yes, there is a lack of rain in Africa, but there is a God that can change this, and with my prayer i can change God I can move God, thus I can bring rain, possibly; therefore the world does not suck utterly, does not lack eternally, because I have God.”

I have to clarify quickly that I am not a defender of freewill nor of determinism. The two seem to me to be beyond actual experience. That said, if we deny freewill, what need is then there for the project of “Know Thyself”?
Know myself? What for?
– “So that from the wretchedness you find within your actual condition so much fear and anxiety emerges that you Create God that you may save yourself through Him.”

— You presume a choice where it doesn’t exist.
O- Not only do I presume, but perhaps Jesus himself presumes.

— Acting as a Christian requires the being of a Christian.
O- By their fruits you shall know them…

— Imitating is fine to a degree but without something deeper and what Jacob Needleman refers to as “intermediate Christianity,” since we are as we are we lose direction and life continues as in a circle.
O- Sme do not use so crude a name as “intermediate christianity” but simply “Grace”.

— This becomes subtle. Simone Weil when very young stumbled onto the ancient practice of the Holy Faculty of Attention. In this way she didn’t imagine herself but coldly experienced life in the raw with a fierce allegiance to truth.
O- She thought perhaps she was experienceing Grace, the light coming from outside the cave. She may have told herself that she was free of any image; that she was an empty husk waiting to be filled by Grace, flowing naturally into the void, the space she had willed. But how is this Grace “Grace”. It is not a favor from God, but something gained by one’s efforts and skill. And by what, other than one’s vanity, do we verify that we are free of our imagination? For example, the question is did she actually experienced life in the raw, or did she simply believed that she was? And how can she tell the difference in either exchange? Can she step outside of herself and verify when she is doing one and not the other? Is she an object to herself? And if she thinks so, is it because it is so or because she imagines it so?

[iman]

Please could you help me you good bible souls to see the truth of God in what He made for today? i see that the bible of Jesus the savior says is the religion that God choose and all followers in church are the chosen for heaven on earth and maybe more, i cannot understand this of what i know God even if it makes the sense of what He said to jews to wait for the messiah in order to be in God love, or to muslims that Jesus is coming back to pray with them, i cannot see God justifying that much the history of catholic church and all the christians in Jesus taking so much of care, it seems to me unfair at both levels, suffering in God is not as suffering outside of his love, how would you give when you can because only of the idea that you are chosen means how a man who say from his feeling of being better could be truthful to the truth, more preciesely how could he love when love in truth is to know that you are not but you become only when you do a geniun speech of hearts, at the higher level, how God who is above all He did in a way that He made it clear that all are so small, would justify a whole group so strongly despite what He said of them being hypocrits puting their savior on trial a bit, more concretely, how GOd is choosing them to say the love beings He wants when He did that they can’t because they are untrue to the strongest need as they don’t need anything?
Please i would be so grateful if you could tell me truely what you feel about what i said and about muslims or any other than christian how do you really feel his being and also what do you think they are comparing to you in God love?

[Nick_A]

Hi Omar

The very option you defend, to know thyself, requires introspection. To know thyself one need not consider a show on television, or study the age of rocks, both of which are incredibly objective, but to meditate, to curve, or recurve, back into the forgotten self that studies rocks and watches television, and looses itself in it’s transaction with things.

What you’ve written centers around this idea that “know thyself” requires introspection. I have to thank you for this since you’ve just made me aware of something I’ve been underestimating. I had not really accepted how differently people appreciate this idea of “know thyself.” Where some would see it dependent on analysis, I believe that introspection is only possible during the lack of associative thought and emotion…

Jacob Needleman writes in the preface of his book: “Lost Christianity:”

But this is not an either/or. The premise --or rather, the proposal – of this book is that at the heart of the Christian religion there exists, and has always existed, just such a vision of God and Man. I call it “Lost Christianity,” not because it is a matter of doctrines and concepts that may have been lost or forgotten; nor even a matter of methods of spiritual practice that may need to be recovered from ancient sources. It is all that, to be sure, but what is lost in the whole of our modern life, including our understanding of religion, is something even more fundamental, without which religious ideas and practices lose their meaning and all to easily become the instruments of ignorance, fear, and hatred. What is lost is the experience of oneself – myself, the personal being who is here, now, living, breathing, yearning for meaning, for goodness; just this person here, now, squarely confronting ones existential weaknesses and pretensions while yet aware, however tentatively, of a higher current of a higher current of life and identity calling to us from within ourselves. This presence to oneself is the missing element in the whole of the life of Man, the intermediate state of consciousness between what we are meant to be and what we actually are. it is perhaps the one bridge that can lead us from our inhuman past toward the human future.

I’m quite sure that the ancients accepted “know thyself” as the same as the “experience of oneself.” I just got a jolt of how “know thyself” has degenerated to mean putting the framework of the experience into the realm of associative thought which psychologically denies introspection. I’m getting the impression that in modern times “know thyself” may be commonly misunderstood as “critique” rather then pure affirmation. To explain further, I return to Simone:

rivertext.com/weil4.html

"Introspection is a psychological state incompatible with other states.

"1. Thinking about things of the world precludes introspection.

"2. Very strong emotion precludes introspection.

"3. All actions which require attention preclude introspection.

"To sum up, thought, action and emotion exclude examination of oneself.

“[therefore] introspection results in one’s taking notice, for the most part, of what is passive in human thought. By the very fact that one keeps a watch on oneself, one changes: and the change is for the worse since we prevent that which is of greatest value in us from playing its part.”
– Lectures on Philosophy

Introspection as it relates to “know thyself” is, I believe, the conscious ACTIVE affirmation of the REACTIONS of our passive unconscious states. As Jacob Needleman says but so difficult to appreciate: it is the “experience of oneself.” She is speaking of conscious awareness while the modern, I believe misguided, conception of “know thyself” includes thought and emotion. Sheesh what a mess we’re in.

I don’t understand. Do you believe that Weil equates “Purity” with “objective reason”? But who’s defilement? Hers or another’s defilement?

As suggested above, it is our consciousness, affirmation, (purity) witnessing our unconscious reactive states having been separated from the conscious connection. As a microcosm, our being exists as levels analogous to the great universe. The mechanical nature of one level is lower than the conscious level of the beginning of consciousness.

So “Purity” is “pure affirmation”?

Actually it is relative affirmation. Our consciousness in relation to our normal unconscious states of being is pure. Our consciousness in comparison to the “Son” is defilement. The Son" in relation to the Father is Defilement.

O- So as I try to understand both you and her, The affirmation of the self (pure affirmation or simply Purity) comes at the price of it’s own defilement. Or, the ability of creating an idea of an identity, this affirmation, comes from the negative of identifying the Other. This initial unity (Lacan’s Mirror?) has no I. It adquires it’s “I”, by sawing off from itself what is not “I”, which becomes it’s defilement, it’s Other. Do I understand you correctly?

One doesn’t create anything. Purity is just the level at which we can consciously affirm our lower unconscious states of existence. At a high level it is the "experience"of ourselves. Any attempt to create anything renders the experience meaningless.

Trajic in all of this is that God is not our Creator, our Father, but really, is actually our Creation, our Son. Sublime, but still leaves us alone with a fantasy-- a mirror imagine of ourselves we forgot was only us.

IMO a dangerous misconception. It is true that Man is in the image of God. We are fallen man and having divided sexually as well into male and female.

As I understand it, the God – Son – Man relationship is analogous to the relationship on the piano between high C, middle C, and low C. They are the same but differ in their vibratory frequency. One then is included in the other much like in the Russian dolls. Here is a gem from Meister Eckhart:

As the soul becomes more pure and bare and poor,
and possesses less of created things,
and is emptied of all things that are not God,
it receives God more purely, and is more completely in Him;
and it truly becomes one with God,
and it looks into God and God into it, face to face as it were;
two images transformed into one.
Some simple folk think that they will see God
as if He were standing there and they here.
It is not so. God and I, we are one.

This is the same idea. Man as Low C becoming himself now corresponds with God and is alive within God. Only someone that truly has gone beyond could see and experience with such a clarity as Meister Eckhart.

The key according to her is not our consciousness. The world sucks because of a lack of perfection and God comes to him that refuses to see the world as perfect. Our unconsiouness is to the lack of perfection and it prevents us from having faith in God: We simply don’t need God, if the world is perfect. Consciousness of the world’s imperfections and a refusal to justify them leads one into a collision course with God. What happens in the world, you told me in the last post, is bound to happen, regardless of our collective presence of mind. The creature cannot not obey…

Not at all. There is no collision course. Think of what she means here:

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.

• Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
  the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 417

God’s will is not done on earth. it exists as a potential and part of Man’s conscious purpose. By witnessing the situation, it creates a void where something higher can enter. This is what she means by the role of the associative mind to submit. It only gets in the way here of this affirmation.

Know myself? What for?

To “experience” yourself and not just live in a dream. Naturally this presupposes a person’s desire for truth. Many are content living in a dream. Then, of course, this has no meaning.

Not only do I presume, but perhaps Jesus himself presumes.

Maybe so but any genuine understanding can only come to a person who needs the truth at the expense of the dream enough to invite it.

O- By their fruits you shall know them…

True, but before one can do this a person must be able to distinguish between Christianity and Christendom.

Matthew 7:

15"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

Appreciating good fruit requires appreciating the distinction between Christianity and Christendom. This is very rare and why false prophets are so successful.

O- Some do not use so crude a name as “intermediate Christianity” but simply “Grace”.

Grace either comes from what we appreciate as a gift or the results of an active conscious need for help from above.

“Grace [in terms of Plato’s Cave read the true light coming from outside the cave] fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it. We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves.” Simone Weil

This is the active need.

For example, the question is did she actually experienced life in the raw, or did she simply believed that she was? And how can she tell the difference in either exchange? Can she step outside of herself and verify when she is doing one and not the other? Is she an object to herself? And if she thinks so, is it because it is so or because she imagines it so?

As far as her willful experience of life in the raw, I don’t think that anyone having studied her life would doubt it. Neither you nor I could have such dedication.

I have never read of anyone so free of vanity which is why I doubt any vain self deception. As she said in a letter to her friend father Perrin shortly before her death in response to questions.

In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the Fioretti the accounts of apparitions rather put me off if anything, like the miracles in the Gospel. Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call to read them. In reading as in other things I have always striven to practice obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat. God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.

AllI can say Omar is that in those Like Simon Weil, we cannot assume the same as with us. It is as if they’ve come from a different place and are so to speak between two worlds. I find it rewarding to contemplate rather than critique. What does it mean for us if she was authentic?

[Nick_A]

iman

In all fairness, that is a whole other topic. If it really concerns you, begin another thread with the essential questions and perhaps we can discuss it. But what I’m writing about now is hard enough.

[socratus]

1. Descartes said: “I think , therefore I am”
2. When Zen/Tibetan Buddhist monks, trained in meditation,
   begin conscious awareness, the “I think not, therefore I am”
   How to understand, how to connect all these opinions.?
   =======================
   The universe is two-dimensional: together with the Material world, also the Spiritual world exists.
   These two worlds, although interacting between them, but fundamentally differ from each other.
   That is why different methods of knowledge are needed for the learning of these worlds.
   In usual life we perceive the world with the organs of feelings and logics.
   But these methods are not suitable for the perceiving of the Spiritual world.
   At knowledge of the spiritual world the organs of feelings will not help,
   logical thought does not interfere, one has to stop the stream of time.
   Socratus.

[Nick_A]

Hi Socratus

1. Descartes said: “I think , therefore I am”
2. When Zen/Tibetan Buddhist monks, trained in meditation,
   begin conscious awareness, the “I think not, therefore I am”
   How to understand, how to connect all these opinions.?

I can, therefore I am. Simone Weil

For “I am” to have any reality, I believe it must include the posibility of its expression. Impotent thought is not I am. “I can” begins with the individuality behind associative thought which enables “doing.” I believe the monk is referring to the conscious affirmation of self which is not what we know as thinking, yet leads to real “doing.”

[iman]

Hi Nick

If you think of your believes it means that truth is in you too, so you would see of feel that as long as the words are true you are saying the same or you can, i don’t know how you understand what i am saying of the truth i feel responding to your words, but in my concern i don’t need another thread while the same topic is running so many where, it is more to me a reaction to other perception of the same truth

[iman]

correct me if i am wrong, you love the truth from another view not yours you must fear your senses of it you prefer ot project them on a screen that is why your Simone fantom is so much with your thoughts, it is fine to me, but i see that you don’t want to give help that you prefer too much your hiding concern than to give any what might help, it is fine too but for the sake of truth that we all want don’t say a word when i wasn’t adressing to you

[omar]

Hello Nick:
I believe that we agree a lot-- that I can agree with much of what Miss Weil is trying to say. Believe me, I am not trying to simply critique for the hell of it, but that I believe that a lot of unexamined ideas occur in her thought, but that then you turn and tell me that what we are trying to do here is to remove “inner lies”.
Expressed in another way, many christians would agree with her, in that belief in God, or in that which is higher than us (etc) comes from a feeling that the world is not right, that something is amiss, that we must have as it were the appetite for God, a longing for what is absent here, if we are to truly believe.
The first of these assumptions is that there is this Light outside of the cave. We ignore the possibility that the light solely exist within our hearts.
We begin with the supposition of a duality: There is the cave and there is the outside of the cave. The supposition here that the Light coming into our cave is from the “Sun”, from outside all caves. Why could it not be that the light is from just another cave, and that that outer cave sits inside another cave.
Let me express it in yet another way…by way of a parable:
Once there was a square who lived in a 2d world, his cave, but in whose heart the light of a separate reality from his shone. Deep within he knew that his longing was proof that this could not be all.
One day his suspicions were confirmed, as a grave event, allowed his being to rise and sure enough, he became a cube. He felt elated. A sphere approached him to welcome him.
-“Greetings”
– " Where am I?"

• “Welcome to the Real…”
  – “Woah!”
  A little bit later, of say a few thousand years passed and the initial fury that elated him subsided and being became habit and the Real lost it’s luster.
  He began to distrust that Sphere. This could not be the Real, because he still longed in his heart and thus, it was evident that another Reality, a true Reality existed. He decided to confrom his anfitrion.
  – “There must be more to existence than this.”
• “Trust me, there isn’t.”
  – “How do you know?”
• “Isn’t it obvious?”
  – “You’re dilutted. you are a slave sphere and thus you cannot know the truth, but there exist atrue reality outside of this cave.”

Can you see my point?..

— I believe that introspection is only possible during the lack of associative thought and emotion…
O- If you’re lacking thought and emotion then what could the word “Know” mean? In any case, we can agree that retrospection requires that we leave out the word, or as she has said thinking of thongs of this world. It does not mean that we do not think. Secondly, we agree if by emotion you specificly refer tp strong emotions, as she does. “Very strong emotion precludes introspection”. Not that other emotions do as well.

Quote:
" – myself, the personal being who is here, now, living, breathing, yearning for meaning, for goodness; just this person here, now, squarely confronting ones existential weaknesses and pretensions while yet aware, however tentatively, of a higher current of a higher current of life and identity calling to us from within ourselves."
O- He yearns for meaning and in that weakened state, in his desire for what he yearns , for what he lacks, how often the hearts of men affirm the possibility for their yearning being fulfilled-- that while the cave has little meaning for them, outside there exist, he is certain, Meaning.
All that to me only proves that there is meaning in our hearts and that Reality may not satisfy it. It is not by some objective interaction that meaning is received. Meaning and the lack of it have their birth in the heart of the man. Perhaps the calling is just within ourselves and refers to no outside, or higher being, but to the yearning in our hearts alone.
But why see this? Yea, when the belief in Heaven leaves one in a better situation that before…perhaps in someone’s youth…

“This presence to oneself is the missing element in the whole of the life of Man, the intermediate state of consciousness between what we are meant to be and what we actually are. it is perhaps the one bridge that can lead us from our inhuman past toward the human future.”
O- The bridge leads always to another side. They always say:“The grass is greener on the other side”. How true. That is why we cross that bridge, that is why we build that bridge-- for surely the bridge is a human invention-- and if we did not have a bridge, we would leap. The bridge is the awerness of that calling, that categorical imperative within, that God-shaped hole within. We cross that bridge and some might say we are penetrated by it, but the truth is that we are completed with it, because it fills the hole within. When it does not, then another leap is needed, to fill the gaps still left within. Our only requirement for reality is that it fills us, that it makes us whole, satisfied, happy, eternal. It is not then about obedience to something from without but from within, as our only God is our ego. A God that we cannot understand is no God. A reality that leaves us yearning for meaning is no reality. God is God by His utility to us.
That is what I see in the good doctor…

— I’m quite sure that the ancients accepted “know thyself” as the same as the “experience of oneself.”
O- The point is that it does not matter. Were the ancients correct by simply being ancient? Were they in possession of the truth by simply being Greeks? And do the moderns err simply because they are trying to understand the thought of the ancients, who in turn, lacking a consensus on who dictated the aphorism, claim that it came from the Gods? Whether you are trying to “know thyself” or to “experience yourself” ancient-like or modern like, it all painfully rest, painfully to these delicate creatures, on a fundamental error.
Alexander Pope wrote in a poem:
“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!”
A fair description of the human condition…

— I’m getting the impression that in modern times “know thyself” may be commonly misunderstood as “critique” rather then pure affirmation.
O- Not so much as a critique, but as Socrates would say an “examination”.

Quote:
"Introspection is a psychological state incompatible with other states.

"1. Thinking about things of the world precludes introspection.

"2. Very strong emotion precludes introspection.

"3. All actions which require attention preclude introspection.

"To sum up, thought, action and emotion exclude examination of oneself.

“[therefore] introspection results in one’s taking notice, for the most part, of what is passive in human thought. By the very fact that one keeps a watch on oneself, one changes: and the change is for the worse since we prevent that which is of greatest value in us from playing its part.”
– Lectures on Philosophy
O- Instrospection, she is saying, results in a lack of thought about the world, a lack action and a lack of emotion. For this reason it prevents “that which is of greatest value in us from playing its part.” So why should we know ourselves? Why should we not instead simply Think about things in the world? Why should we not rather act? Why should we not rather feel and feel strongly? I can agree with this. This is what I mean that it is not what we know or don’t know about ourselves, in whichever way you or I understand this, but what we do.
“The Kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation.”
“Why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not do what I say?”
And what did he say? That is what all wish to forget…

— Not at all. There is no collision course.
O- I did not mean it in the negative sense but as being in the path towards.

Quote:
Know myself? What for?

— To “experience” yourself and not just live in a dream. Naturally this presupposes a person’s desire for truth. Many are content living in a dream. Then, of course, this has no meaning.
O- Morpheous…? This seems all so far away from anything Jesus may have said and the question remains unanswered: Why did Jesus have to die?

Quote:
Matthew 7:

15"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

— Appreciating good fruit requires appreciating the distinction between Christianity and Christendom.
O- The distinction is already there; it does not need an investigation. The Torah gives the rule to distinguish between the false and the true prophet and indeed Jesus is right. Deuteronomy 18:22.

Quote:
In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the Fioretti the accounts of apparitions rather put me off if anything, like the miracles in the Gospel. Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.

— AllI can say Omar is that in those Like Simon Weil, we cannot assume the same as with us. It is as if they’ve come from a different place and are so to speak between two worlds. I find it rewarding to contemplate rather than critique.
O- Again, I amk sympathetic of our shared condition. It is not simply to critique but to examine the claims some make within our condition. So she felt loved in her sufferings? That is wonderful. But that is a metaphysical consolation. she rides a contradiction in that she criticises that in religion but performs it herself. Was she consoled? Perhaps not, but sometimes knowing that one is loved is can ease our sufferings greatly. And the distinctions made are of so little consequence. If the christian feels consoled it is not because this life is fine, but that the Gospel is true, and in that bothe the religious and her as well agree. here we suffer, but we can ask our father for easement of our sufferings. yet both have in their hearts that there exist a reality in which no recourse will be needed as there shall be no suffering. She might be convinced that she might not sense God here below, but she claims that she will be grasped by Jesus Above, as if in Heaven. Pray tell where is the difference?

— What does it mean for us if she was authentic?
O- For the heart that longs it is the meaning made possible itself that authenticates. As for me I only know that I know nothing. Is she correct? we would have to examine that?
The one who longs needs no examination. For me such postulations are posteriories, while for others they are prioris and fundamental…as I said before their belief is made possible by a fundamental error.

[Nick_A]

Hi Iman

I didn’t mean to appear offensive and apologize if it seemed so.

What you are asking is impossible to explain because it requires reasoning in the opposite we are accustomed to, Normally we reason from the bottom up in our daily lives. But in spiritual concepts, I’ve learned that we have to begin with the idea of consciousness greater then ourselves moving down from purity into corruption. This allows us to put corruption into a higher context rather than limited to the usual cultural context which makes all the difference.

If the universe is conscious as I believe then there are levels of consciousness between God as complete consciousness and Man on earth which is at the beginning stage of consciousness.

If I’m understanding you, you give the impression as though God actually cares about these concepts we’ve come up with reasoning from the bottom up. I don’t believe it is the case.

Religion in the pure form I believe has the purpose of allowing us to become open through exposure to consciousness so that our “being” can grow consciously. The being of unconscious Man does not really grow. it stays the same and the only change comes from the mechanics of the body aging. It cannot change consciously because all of our attention is fixated on dealing with external life or in flowery imagination. All this talk about whether or not God favors for one side or another is foolish IMO. All the great traditions beginning with the presence of a conscious source like Jesus or Buddha for example, provide ways of self development appropriate for the culture it begins in. An Eastern tradition is very slow for the Western mind which is why Western Buddhism has become so similar to Secular Humanism. Pressures of Western life make people lose the consciousness of it. Yet in an Eastern Buddhist temple in can offer great rewards.

suffering in God is not as suffering outside of his love, how would you give when you can because only of the idea that you are chosen means how a man who say from his feeling of being better could be truthful to the truth, more preciesely how could he love when love in truth is to know that you are not but you become only when you do a geniun speech of hearts, at the higher level,

As I said, if I am reading you wrong because I’m not sure where the sentence ends, I’m doing the best I can. I believe that you mean that the only person that truly can speak from the heart is the truly spiritual person. I agree. In fact there is a law that the quality of what can be understood can only be at the quality of the person speaking. A person who truly speaks from their heart speaks from their “being” and can touch our being. This is very rare. A person who speaks only from the mind can only touch our mind. This is why great speeches filled with glorious platitudes wear off quickly. They only touch the mind.

Here is another law. The higher can understand the lower but the lower cannot understand the higher. Where Jesus could promote followers, his "being"also evoked the urge to kill from Man’s egotism. He made people uneasy. As Simone Weil has said: “Truth is on the side of death and we don’t want to die.” Those in the Bible completely caught up in their image psychologically didn’t want to psychologically die so Jesus needless to say was a disturbing image and had to be strung up in one way or another.

Chosen people doesn’t refer to a culture or a particular group. It refers to a mindset and openness to conscious truths. It is like the idea of “Pharisee” in the Bible. It is not referring to a particular group but a psychological mindset that exists in all cultural groups. Our task is to discover the Pharisee within ourselves; that part of our psych that takes things literally for the sake of appearance and open to hypocrisy.

So rather then look for good or bad guys in the world; a practice which has caused so much religious strife, a true teaching invites us and teaches us how to look for these traits in ourselves. The true differences between people from the objective spiritual perspective are not man made labels but openness to the essence of all these teachings which is becoming open to consciousness not from excessive gazing UP at the heavens but in the courage to consciously look DOWN for the experience of oneself.

As far as why such people should have power over Jesus and crucify him is a deep question and really not appropriate here. It has to do with Man’s objective relationship to “affliction.” This is a whole other topic but if you get a glimpse of what Simone Weil is referring to in this quote, it is obvious that it is double edged:

With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed. Simone Weil