Pantheism

I’m a little skeptical.

Is there really an all-encompassing ontology? No theism is absent of doubt.

I don’t think there can be any principles at root, we ascribe principles to things, but prior to those things there is something else one would imagine.

JSS,

The Divine Realm is “physical” too, just not obvious obviously. It’s way more than mere principles. You have memories of a life lived, but no emotional attachments to those memories.

? … …

According to pantheism God is in everything resp. everything is in God, because God is nature resp. nature is God, or there is no God but only nature and humans just call nature "God“ resp. there is no nature but only God (the existence of the world is repealed - so to say).

The “gods” are the principles. The “God” is the one underlying (or over-arching) Principle from which all others are formed. As Moses put it [paraphrased], “The only true God: It is what it is. Worship nothing else”.

And only false principles “die”.

You have a different definition of “physical” and “divine” than I.

So they have to “die” in the mortal realm, thus as thoughts in the brain?

They can vanish from human thought. A perfect circle doesn’t stop being a perfect circle just because none are around and no one thinks of it. Principles and forms don’t change what they are or change in any way at all, thus there is no “dying” to be had. Perfect squares, laws of motion, and such “divine” concerns never, ever change in any way at all. They are “outside of time”.

This is exactly in line with my own thinking. As I’ve defined “God” myself once before: God is a metaphorical understanding of what itself, as this very understanding, is. I have to add “metaphorical” because “understanding”, technically speaking, is an artifact of human mentality, and I think Mind writ large (note the capital M) far surpasses human mentality. But I do think the underlying principle of the universe is something like a human understanding (of a fundamental principle)–enough so that the metaphor works.

Essentially, it is an apprehension of an existence that justifies itself at face value.

This captures the gist of it. I sometimes struggle with the logic of this myself, being the subjectivist/idealist that I am. I sometimes get confused (over my own philosophy of all things ) about how an understanding of a universal principle can, at once, be permanent and ephemeral at the same time. It is ephemeral as a thought (in virtue of the way we reflect on them), but permanent as the principle the thought projects as (where “projection” has a special meaning in my subjectivist philosophy). The key is timelessness. Thoughts as such are subject to time, but principles are not. I haven’t fleshed this aspect of my philosophy out in as much detail as it needs (thus the occasional confusion) but I know that the timelessness of principles is key.

JSS,

Experiencing the difference does tend to define the Divine and physical for the experiencer.

Gibmemore,

Is there a debate about eternity going on? Course it’s timeless.

Eternity defines the boundaries between time and timelessness; it’s like asking: does time occur in time or is it timeless itself?

We use time to make eternity bite-sized.

If eternity can also be seen as time without end, how does it energize and renew itself?

What do you mean by this, Arc?

Hi brown eyes.

Maniacal Mongoose wrote:
We use time to make eternity bite-sized.

If we are in perfect flow, there is no “using” of time, there are no tidbits of time. We are swimming in harmony with it.

I can see though where what he is saying is true for us. Perhaps that’s all that we can handle in the moment.

Would you say then that eternity is in the moment?

That’s such a cute little avatar you have going, gib.

I know that it has become such a cliche but yes speaking subjectively, eternity is in the moment.
That moment may feel like heaven or hell.
Heaven doesn’t usually for some reason seem to last such a long time - we do have to learn to be epicureans if not stoics and be grateful… but hell, ah, like a walk on the surface of Venus or what I might imagine it to be. lol

It makes the most sense.

Considering the nature of consciousness, that is…

Arc wrote

Emotions.

Also, each lifetime your soul’s mind is wiped fairly clean. Mine could have been made cleaner.

Yeah, that’s Rick and Morty. I’ve been going through a few of those lately. In fact, I started an entire thread analyzing the Rick and Morty series.

And it’s because we associate heaven or hell with eternity that we feel it in the moment, correct?

I sometimes think eternity must be in the moment because we apprehend it in the moment–in this very conversation, for example–we think about it and understand it, which is a kind of “beholding” it. It’s like all the past and all the future is here in the present. Because in language, we say “there is a past, there is a future.” ← As if it’s here now.

That’s kind of how hell’s pictured in that Keanu Reeves movie, Constantine:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL8Kl-8H9k8[/youtube]