Such wisdom =D>
Reminds me of the idiom … “Out of the mouth of babes” … you are so young to “see” this Dan.
NT
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One of my biggest fears is that i wont be powerful enough to handle and survive a life in the spirit world.
Modern humans don’t know what true power is, or what it’s like to live near the bottom of the food chain.
When they think about saving their soul, it is usually a path of theism.
Dan … have you read my latest OP “Individuation”?
Your above comment is precisely why so few people enter the “dark night” voluntarily. To enter the night safely one must be tethered to mighty strong spirits. 
Some people get chewed up pretty good in their lifetime(s).
Still largely true today … tomorrow … who knows eh!
Dan, I can even go atheist to be there with you if you need it. The nooks and crannies of the spirit world are vast. I can tell you one thing: people want the best for themselves - when eternal death knocks, nobody answers the door. Never have, never will.
That, and spend a lot of time developing one’s self where possible.
The universe is packed full of spirits. But finding a good one is up to the person in question.
Jung … a life lived extraordinarily well. There is no end to this guys path, and it keeps getting richer. He died like Crowley died, anticipating.
Id say he is the standard for how we should approach the drive to philosophize in ourselves.
I’m going to point out the obvious to people, though they may struggle with the idea…
Churches and marriages are stages of our and others’ evolution…
We’ll always have what we’re true towards, which in a practical sense is mutual experiences of beauty… even those we consider wicked rely on the kindness of others to do these things… once they figure out that this is what’s the important part, they begin to nurture it more and more…
Dan … my experience tells me spirits find us … we do not find them.
If you check out my writings on the subject “My Spiritual Family” I describe to the best of my limited capabilities how I met the spirits currently in my life. You may also note the list starts with Jesus and Mary … followed by a community of well known Catholic Saints and ends with two non Catholic historic personages … Mao Zedong and Lao Tzu. This confirms what I shared with you in a recent PM.
A religion with hope would be concerned with the ultimate destiny of Man. It would therefore be this-worldly, here and now perpetuation of ecosystems. In the past Utopias such as Brook Farm failed because nobody wanted to do the down to earth menial tasks necessary for maintenance of a viable community. I think Gaskin’s Farm still prospers. The former was an ideal; the latter is a practice. A religion of the future cannot afford to be impractical.
As an issue of being practical, the current Media has control over what people believe to be hopeful and worthy of effort.
And when has it been any different?
What’s the difference between the strategy employed by the current media and the ancient priestly class of Judaism … why do all world religions require heresy, apostasy and so on?
Such wasn’t the point, but there have been times throughout history, far less technological times, when the general populous was far more free of Media mental oppression. Early USA was one of those times when organized propaganda Media was illegal with competition being the primary enforcer. Today, with monopolies reinstated, there is no competition, merely the feigning of it, “Let’s all pretend to argue, while never mentioning the actual truth”.
The point was that if you are to base your new religion upon popular beliefs, you are merely extending the current religion.
oops
gib"
Can you say then in one sentence what to you produced consciousness? I do not mean to simplify things here.
The write-up sounded made it sound really interesting.
Well, that’s just the rub. I don’t think consciousness is “produced” at all. I think it is the foundation of being. To experience conscious is simply what it is to be. It is the experience of “here I am” or just “I am”. Everything that exists, exists in virtue of experiencing its existence in some form.
=D> =D>
The reluctant saint is waking up.
The reluctant saint wants to hit snooze a few more times. 
Gib … have you ever taken an overnight train? … I have many times. It’s impossible to sleep … the train consistently though in an irregular pattern jerks and lurches throughout the night.
So it is on our life’s journey … some of us though we are desperate to sleep feel the jerking and lurching of the pulse of the universe. At the appointed time we wake up … there are many ways to wake up … though the process is fraught with peril.
Hmmm, I do not know, gib.
Here is the definition of produced.
p[b]ro·duce
verb
past tense: produced; past participle: produced
prəˈd(y)o͞os/Submit
make or manufacture from components or raw materials.
“the company has just produced a luxury version of the aircraft”
synonyms: manufacture, make, construct, build, fabricate, put together, assemble, turn out, create; More
2.
cause (a particular result or situation) to happen or come into existence.
“no conventional drugs had produced any significant change”
synonyms: give rise to, bring about, cause, occasion, generate, engender, lead to, result in, effect, induce, set off; [/b]
I would have, from the above definition, no problem with thinking that consciousness can, in a large sense, be produced - especially the first one…from components and raw materials…if we stretch our imaginations insofar as what those components and raw materials would include. I do not think that consciousness came from absolutely nothing.
Is consciousness as being produced and as being the foundation of being necessarily exclusive? I may be wrong but I am not so sure that they are.
I think that in a way consciousness/conscious as being produced means the same as human evolution.
Did life on Earth begin with consciousness or is it something which eventually at some point came into existence and has been evolving since then.
As self-awareness or did you mean something different?
Wouldn’t you say that it goes more than a step further than that? Part of that means to be able to know who the I is and to be able to express that - not simply that I exist. Am I wrong there? I am really asking.
The other day you casually implied consciousness with reference to something that was mentioned. So what are you saying here - that your form of consciousness which you implied was simply about here I am or just I am. If that was the case, then in my book, you were making much to do about almost nothing. 
Is that the equivalent of consciousness to you or a conscious being?
Okay - so then, what is it in your estimation that is the cause of consciousness? You said that it was different than that which was previously thought of (paraphrasing).
If it just suddenly appeared on the horizon, that could also be seen as human evolution, yes?
No… no you do not.
Ffffascinating!
Neither do I. I don’t think there ever was nothing.
I completely get where you’re coming from. I remember being of the same mindset myself when I was younger, so I understand that what you’re saying makes sense, has a certain logic to it. We’re all taught, in this scientific/materialistic age–we in the West–that the brain is what produces consciousness and all our subjective experiences. I was a victim of this too once. Oh, the scares that it has left me. 
So it isn’t a question of having a problem with understanding this perspective. But even within this perspective, the question of how consciousness is produced by the brain is still unanswered (isn’t it?). It can even lead to paradoxes within philosophy, or at least absurdities.
Anyway, that’s not the point. I simply have an understanding that consciousness just is being. If I were to translate this into philosophical terms, it might be: the philosophical branch of ontology and the philosophical branch of consciousness are one and the same. ← That’s my one contribution to philosophy! No more! No less! Finito! I can die!
If I were to translate this into metaphorical terms, I’d say this: if existence were a cloth, consciousness would also be this cloth. You, Arc, are an individuated being, a garment cut out of this cloth–or at least you are the region marked out by a pen on this cloth, a design for a garment, that someone thinks (probably you) they can cut out and separate from the rest.
Evolution has its place in existence (obviously), and the role it plays in forming human consciousness is to give us the particular kinds of experience we have. For example, color perception. Other animals do not have this. Other animals aren’t even “animals”–some are plants–certainly with no color vision (not that I’m aware of anyway). But consciousness–Consciousness writ large, that is, with the capital ‘C’–can be played out this way. It can be played out like a rubix cube or a game of shuffle–various combinations and permutations, and many, many qualities. ← That’s what evolution produces! The next, most ‘fit’, combination. The next, most ‘fit’, permutation of qualia that are required for the organism’s survival in its current environment.
IOW, consciousness is never “produced” per se, but just needs to be constantly reconfigured and recombined such that the organism is only ever aware of what it needs to be aware of in order to survive. ← William James wrote a lot about this.
I also get a sense from what you said that you’re putting the horse before the carte. You seem to think that even if consciousness wasn’t ever produced, there would still be a time ‘before’ consciousness. And then you ask, what happened at the moment when, all of a sudden POP!!!, consciousness magically appeared? But have you considered that, as the foundation of being, time resides within consciousness, not the other way around?
Right you are! At this point, it’s difficult to say. At this point, we really have to distinguish in the phrase “I am” what’s of greater import? ‘I’ or ‘am’. It might not surprise you, knowing that I’m partial to Eastern philosophy, that the ‘I’ is particular to human consciousness, so if we are to transcend human consciousness to universal consciousness, then the ‘I’ (at least at this point in the conversation) must go–that leaves us with ‘am’. ← Or essentially: “there is existence”.
^ This single awareness is existence. It is, in the utmost sense, self-awareness–self-awareness as existence.
It’s hard to say without the link, Arc. 
But yeah, in general, consciousness is always about “there is” (the ‘I’ sometimes pays us the occasional visit). If we’re talking about the consciousness of a particular being (not the universe), then we have to add a variable which can differ from particular being to particular being, so we’d say “there is X”. Sometimes, X = I.
Huh? I did?
There is no cause of consciousness. It is the “first principle”–so to speak. Although, there is a cause of human consciousness, but we discussed that already in our talk about evolution.
Absolutely!!! But that’s a big IF–I don’t think consciousness did suddenly appear on the horizon. I think the horizon suddenly appeared in consciousness.