Here’s a thought…
If irredeemable means “unable to be saved, improved or corrected” and God gave humanity the knowledge they needed to be guided out of darkness and become good people but they failed to learn from it, doesn’t that mean they are unable to be saved, improved or corrected and thus are irredeemable?
If so, why wait for a new teacher?
Doesn’t that also suggest that there is a better teacher than God and thus what you think is god is not truly the best or true God?
Just like it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle…
… it is harder for someone who knows the Way but has strayed from it to get back on the path.
But God is kind of into that sort of thing. He likes to interrupt the seemingly impossible. It’s almost like he designed things so that it was possible to surprise people with how much they are loved despite their crap, good or bad.
A new teacher/Way with a new teaching/path is a liar.
Spiritually speaking it’s almost impossible to analyze these things becuase we lack the words and the direct experience needed to do that. So we just make guesses and weird assumptions. Then people argue about their guesses and weird assumptions with other people, clinging to their own while saying those of the other are bad or incorrect. It’s funny to see the nascent spiritualist attempt so easily co-opted back within the mundane materialistic.
A real philosopher would, having broken through philosophy already, set himself to developing a truly spiritualist language of concept exploration and experience, both personal experience and a proper accounting of the sum of experiences others have had as well as all the logic thereby linking all of that together in the ways proper to each step.
You are and have always been your own teacher. But granted, it’s a lot more difficult and tedious to do this heavy work by yourself. It’s nice, yet exceedingly rare, to have colleagues and friends to help.
True. God is beyond thought. So God is beyond your teacher-student analogy or any other we can posit. This is why Buddhists don’t posit God.
I believe in God, but know that any God or gods I can name attributes of is projection.
On the contrary… he is the master who became servant… to demonstrate true mastery.
What kindo’ weirdo projects that, Bob??
That way you do not mistake your conception of God for God, Bob. Pursuant to that end some avoid the word altogether. Movement in that direction can be seen in taboos avoiding pronouncing or writings in G-d’s name in Judaism for instance.
The Ramakrishna tradition’s story of Totapuri is illustrative. Totapuri was trained from early youth, in the disciplines of Advaita Vedanta. He looked upon the world as an illusion. The gods and goddesses of dualistic worship were to him mere fantasies of the deluded mind. Prayers, ceremonies rights and rituals had nothing to do with true religion. About these, he was utterly indifferent. Exercising self exertion and unshakable will power he had liberated himself from attachment to the sense objects of the relative universe. For 40 years, he had practiced austere discipline and had finally realized his identity with the absolute.
Totapuri led Ramakrishna to withdraw his mind from all objects of the relative world including God concepts and to concentrate on the Absolute. Through Vedantic meditation Ramakrishna achieved nondual awareness beyond his God concept. Yet, he also taught Totapuri the power of his God concept on the relative world of existence. An implication of this story may perhaps be that the nondualist must take care that they do not lose the power of God in their quest nondual mental purity.
Nonduality can be mistakenly equated for atheism or agnosticism. In deed it is possible to hold such positions mentally while achieving liberation. Spiritual reality trumps mental conception.
At the same time, my Christian heritage has been strengthened and fulfilled by nondual realization. The Bible speaks to me and points the way to ultimate oneness beyond all name and form. It being a compilation of texts of questionable historical accuracy composed of pre-scientific words translated to English in multiple versions, this is a paradox of the highest order.
That is something I wrote about years ago on this forum when I encountered CS Lewis’s “Footnote on Prayer.” I tried to convey it to the evangelical group I was reading the Bible with in Germany, but sensed (ironically) that I wasn’t expressive enough to show how semantics and rhetoric is never enough.
I was always in awe of those stories told by Jesus or the Ancients, and later Ramakrishna, which is the ability to give their awe expression and not just remain there on the cushion, in one’s “chamber,” at the table with an open book, on knees before the statue, or gaping when facing the majesty that a mountain range can evoke.
Fingers pointing - away from us, towards “the moon,” a sense of a passing by, or descending (but then rising again), ineffable presence, fleeting and ephemeral. The images we have in our minds are “Pheidian fancies,” folk-lore dreams, idols.
I remember reading about how “Lewis was never really a poet,” yet, for all his wordy apologetics, it was in those poems that we connected. He turned to mythology and wrote the Tales of Narnia from my childhood, about “a magic deeper still that [the witch] did not know,” and “how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom.”
This is why (without being a scholar) I am fascinated by the depth achieved in Ancient Hebrew or Sanskrit, although it came from the origins of language, as though those primordial scribes, undistracted, broke into some “magic” that seems sealed for many of us today, although we are woven into its “fabric.”
If irredeemable means “unable to be saved, improved or corrected” and God gave humanity the knowledge they needed to be guided out of darkness and become good people but they failed to learn from it, doesn’t that mean they are unable to be saved, improved or corrected and thus are irredeemable?
Within who’s eyes? God’s eyes or our eyes?
That is a word that we created/coined. How do we know what God thinks or feels about all of this? This is our perception -not necessarily His.
If so, why wait for a new teacher?
I think that at times we are actually meant to have a new teacher. I do not think that all teachers and students fit together - like one size fits all.
I think perhaps at times a teacher has taught everything that the student is meant to have learned from him/her, has changed and is ready for the new teacher.
Doesn’t that also suggest that there is a better teacher than God and thus what you think is god is not truly the best or true God?
Ultimately, where does ALL intelligence and wisdom come from?
thus what you think is god is not truly the best or true God?
This is certainly true. How do we know when we’ve found Him?
I believe in God, but know that any God or gods I can name attributes of is projection.
I may be misunderstanding you here, Bob, but let’s say that you are looking up into the most incredible blue sky with the most awesome glorious clouds (although that in itself might just be my own perception)…I mean clouds that there are just not a human word for… to do justice to them.
You are going to look at this sky and these clouds and attribute them to who and what you are within, what lies within you?!
You cannot see that only God ultimately “created” and is responsible for the unfolding and the evolving of all of this that you see in the sky at this moment?
Of course, I realize that this is what I see, what I know,
Hi Arc,
well, first of all, I don’t see your example as relevant to what I was actually saying.
I’ll answer the question though. Just because I see something that I have no words for doesn’t say anything about the clouds, but only about my inability.
There is no reason to attribute them to anything but natural cloud formations, just as I wouldn’t immediately attribute any natural object to God. What I would do if asked is say that nature, or the physical universe seems to be the emergent physical representation of “cosmic consciousness” for want of another word. Just don’t ask me how.
The reason why I say this is because consciousness seems to be primary.
The G-d that can be understood cannot be the primal, or cosmic G-d, just as an idea that can be expressed in words cannot be the infinite idea And yet this ineffable G-d was the source of all spirit and matter, and being expressed was the mother of all created things. Therefore not to desire the things of sense is to know the freedom of spirituality; and to desire is to learn the limitation of matter. These two things spirit and matter, so different in nature, have the same origin. This unity of origin is the mystery of mysteries, but it is the gateway to spirituality.
I have substituted G-d for Tao. I might have substituted Logos as in John I. In that text we see a picture of incarnation. The I AM which announces Itself in history is at the center of our being. It shines with the self luminousity of consciousness not only within ourselves but in every being. The universe is the projection of its shining. But, this is not a phenomenon apart from you. You are It.
There is an Arabic/ Muslim argument:
Is This The Best Argument For God’s Existence? (youtube.com)
Can we entertain it?
One criterion: Does the god demonstrate self=other love?
If no: Then they do not have true power, and are not good, and know nothing of import.
Brilliant! And that necessary being is consciousness itself. You.
If all possible worlds contain Bob, and there is only one possible “greatest possible” world, being the actual world (past/future inclusive essentially), …
… but then there is aseity.
Who would claim it? Certainly not I.
Nor even felix.
He shoves Bob in front of him like a lightning shield, and flatters him to stay there.
You obviously haven’t paid attention to what has been posting for some while now.
There are only 17 posts in this thread.
This brilliant contribution got nothin but crickets.
It’s fine. I’m used to crickets. We understand each other.
The problem is that you gave me your version, which I respect, but it isn’t the only narrative. I am also attracted to the idea of the master and the emissary, but another version. In the version that I have found attractive, the master has a wide persective, encompassing everything perceptible, and the emissary is the one who categorises, names, grabs and triess to utilise.
That even sounds familiar in a religious sense, in that from the earth a model is formed and the living spirit is blown into it. It is living spirit in a restricted physical form, which reaches out to discover the world. The rest of the story expllains how he got lost. Your narrative suggests how he can find his way again. Fine.
This thread topic is “Not the true God?” You seem to have gotten lost.
