What Makes A God?

I agree that there is a level of precipitating causality necessary for the brain to create, obviously if you remove all the possible functions of the body, there is nothing to direct and receive messenges to function to, still once connected that's what the brain does.

 

The brains function lies in this description then, it is communication.

 

If you see the fundamental unity of the cosmos, then why you are pushing aside Astrology and the notion that the planets have an effect on our lives is beyond me, or the notion that someone can have a spiritual relationship with a planet. If you see the unity, then you would respect the authenticity that humans have with their relationship with God, no matter which form that that relationship takes, or which God(s) it functions through. I'm not denying the shittyness of Religion, however, i don't believe that there isn't an intelligent Aware essence to the Cosmos. A Universal Consciousness which I would call God, and which can function through both Science and Religion.

If you see the Unity, then you also respect that people have their own versions of their relationship with that Unity. Many people call it God.

I especially love the strawman of me denying any validity to true spiritual experience or the fundamental unity of the cosmos.

To lay this to rest China, here is just ONE, just ONE of many experiences I have had. http://www.hipforums...al-shroom-trip/

If you are at all honest you will now cease and desist with this ad hominem tangent that flies in the face of the entire reason I have an account on these forums.

 

Advaita is a wonderful concept, but it's also not very useful if you don't recognise a tangible differencebetween things. This is why mint is different to chilli, and why sitting on Earth thinking about being on Neptune is not actually being on Neptune. The egoic separation is real and quite useful, it adds variety.

Yes it is totally fine and indiduality isn't removed because of Oneness, it's just liberated. Separation is trapped if one truly believes that all is separate in an essential way.

Said Chinacat's inflated ego, as he separated himself and looked down bitterly at his fellow explorer.

You're contradicting your above statement. If separation isn't a bad thing, then what's the problem? Writer is the one from the beginning who has put down most of my ideas as if I'm a complete idiot, and even suggested multiple times that I'm Schizo. I'm not the one who has initially had an attitude towards him.

 

The uncovery that rivalled the brutality of the raw beauty of the whole "we are one" thing is actually the removal of what that uncovery implied for me, that individualism was a bad thing. That one went deep for me. A misunderstanding that's rife among the "new age", so deeply ingrained in the culture. It's surfacing though, from decades and possibly centuries of repression.

Actually for most of history and especially in the US, Individuality and Separation has dominated the human psyche. And like I said, Oneness doesn't eliminate individuality, it just allows people to see that there's no reason to kill each other over it. Diversity can be celebrated.

 

You are all over the place ChinaCat, in the first part you want to point out Writer's folly in bias of having egoic Separation, then in the second part YOU turn around and adopt that egoic separation?

Actually I am pointing to anyone's God or Soul essence. I'm not implying egoic separation. When I say You, I'm saying it akin to the I AM part of you, which is beyond your brain and body. I'm talking about Self.


It does both CREATING and CHANNELING in a 'humdrum' neuroscientific model, unless I misunderstand your meaning of Channeling. The Brain is CREATING neurotransmitters, neurons, hormones, develops folds, thickens white matter, etc. Then the brain is also is CHANNELING information from genes, the environment, the body in regards to autonomic functioning and what not. Presumably it can be explicable without having to pull shit out of the Aether.

And why can it not be the Aether? And it's not actually proved that it's creating.

The easy 'counter' example along the lines to show where you are probably significantly underestimating some aspects of the given scenario in terms of signals, is let's say you pick up the cup and end up spilling scalding hot coffee on your hand. When you spill some scalding hot Coffee on your hands, Are you really deciding to move your hand in this instance? or is it more of an automatic reaction ?
In regards to your rather mundane example, it's still far more complex neurologically speaking then you are making it out to be. To illustrate more what it would be like, which probably still does not fully capture the neuroactivity, I'll break it down more.

You see a cup on the ground
-Message gets sent to the occipital Lobe to see the cup.

You contemplate whether or not to pick it up.
-Executive functioning in the frontal lobe and neocortex activate.

You locate the distance of the cup.
-Parietal lobe registers for spatial recognition.

You reach for the come.
-Brain signals to the arm to reach for the cup and raise the cup

Who is this YOU that you are referring to this entire time?

 

This

 

Belief doesn't change what is true. If there is no separation then the belief there is doesn't create separation. It is necessary for survival to distinguish one thing from another. Being an agglomerate of diverse expression there is a way we relate. Concepts of individuality can make you feel alone and create an air of foreboding, fear.

 

The "I" that you were talking about in the example of picking up the cup...

I'd appreciate it if you quote me directly, because this copy and paste thing you started recently doing makes it really sloppy and difficult to read on mobile.

We can comeup with parameters where the brain is not communicating either if we continue to remove this and that in the body, it could be made the case to be a misnomer as well from a similar perspective. Perhaps they are slightly anthropomorphic but I think Communication and Creation are both really good descriptions for various aspects of what a functioning brain is doing.

 

I agree, the descriptors you are using now are more comprehensive than the brain makes chemicals.

 

i like that. good question. i think there may be neat fun invisible things, but gods and demons are words humans made up to describe things no one really knows anything about.

the ego has this problem accepting that there are things it doesn't know.

but that's a separate thing from whether and what might exist that we don't know about.

invisible thing that are smarter and stronger the any of us, even of all of us together.
no reason to assume most invisible things are though.

and what's with everything invisible and greater then ourselves wanting either to be harmful or to be worshiped?
there's no reason to assume either of those things. nor to assume they can't exist without being one or the other.

humans are just nuts about this stuff, and being so, really has nothing to do with what might or might not exist.

what is a god? everything any of us say, is pulling it out of nowhere. or some book written by a bunch of other people, also most likely pulling it out of nowhere.
that disclaimer being made, here's mine:

big, friendly and invisible, doesn't micro-manage and isn't at war with anything.
(mostly too big for there to be anything close to its own size big enough to be at war with)

and there's too big of a universe out there, with too many worlds full of too many different kinds of people,
each evolved on their own worlds and in accordance with them
to be able to really to have that much to do with any one of them
other then always having time for an invisible hug.

and i don't believe a god can be owned by any one belief.
again that is only our own ego wanting to believe that it can.

 

What does "actually" prove mean to you?

I think this exemplifies why perhaps some of us think your ideas regarding magick and astrology are nonsense and don't want to consider them seriously or moreover don't even really follow what it is you are suggesting when talking about it, speaking for myself at least but I've seen similar comments more or less. Clearly you are holding a different standard here based on your bias, that of NO EVIDENCE for the aether yet seem to genuinely want to consider it and substantial supporting evidence for the functionality in the brain, which apparently since every detail has not been thoroughly understood, doesn't "actually" prove it to you.

I'm fairly certain if you held magick and astrology to the same or even a remotely similar standard as you have mainstream science, you would not legitimately accept them on the dogmatic faith that you display.

I'm starting to get the impression, that aside from being posted on some pseudoscience new age site, there is no amount of evidence that would convince you in regards to some of the the particular issues you have with science.

 

Plainly and without any additional specificity god is that which we invoke. To invoke is to cite as or appeal to authority. Too big, too many, or too ephemeral is another citation. What makes a god is our level of devotion. From this perspective it is accurate to say that many behave as though god were money.

 

Those are two different things though. The former is an ancient pseudoscientific way of assigning particular mythologically inspired values to the positions of stars and planets during ones birth; the latter is a simple statement of reality.

The planets obviously affect our lives, just like bacteria obviously affect our lives. That doesn't mean that a single statement within astrology is correct. The reason they are not correct, is that they were never founded on observation and science. People just decided "Someone born under Taurus will be stubborn, because Taurus is a bull, and bulls are stubborn". There was no relationship between these claims and reality; no astrologer has ever "Gone and checked" his data to make sure it make sense; you just take it on authority that the tenets of astrology are valid and true. What is the process for altering those tenets? If we do a huge study tomorrow and find that actually, on average, stubborness does not increase or decrease based on month of birth, then where do we go to rewrite what it means to be a Taurus? The lack of answer that comes to mind is because astrology is not interested in dealing with reality; astrology is in the religion game.

Meanwhile you serve as a terrific example of someone not born under the bull who is very stubborn, and in fact you, like everyone on earth, possess the qualities of all of the zodiac.

Yeah here I just want to be very careful with the language and not imply that because someone is sitting in a room, thinking of their idea of Neptune, that therefore they have something meaningful to bring back to us about the actual planet Neptune.

Likewise, someone sitting in a room and telling us that he's had an experience with "God", needs to be taken very skeptically, as grand claims require grand evidence.

There was a famous warlord merchant in ancient arabia who had a very convincing encounter with the Archangel Gabriel. It was convincing enough that over a billion people on this planet structure their lives around what he "brought back"; but you're not a muslim, so you reject the claims of Muhammad. But how? Why? What is your reasoning for not being a muslim? After all, someone sat somewhere, and had thoughts in his head, and when he came back, he said they were from God himself. He even managed to get it down on paper with apparent great accuracy; on what basis do you dismiss these claims? Surely his spiritual experience with god HAD to be the case, since he claimed it was?

Yeah here you're losing me a bit, with the "authenticity" bit. It's possible for you to hold beliefs very strongly, very dearly, beliefs that define you to the core as who you are, and it's possible for those beliefs to be dead wrong. I think this is where you are struggling and where you lack the experience and wherewithal to consider that it's possible for someone to value something in an ultimate way, for their entire lives, and for the fact of the matter to be that that person has wasted their life on that belief, insofar as it is false. I'm more than aware of the argument from utility, but you're not making that argument. You're making the argument that because someone CLAIMS that they "Had an experience with god/neptune/krishna/kundalini" and that subjectivity is always necessarily first-person, that therefore truth-claims about their statements MUST always return a verdict of "true". This is a bizarre position to hold and you obviously haven't thought it through too well.

That's fine, you can believe that. It's still an empirical question open to evidence, so you could be wrong about that.

I too believe that ONE WAY TO INTERPRET consciousness is that there is a universal consciousness, that consciousness is a field which has concentrated nodes, for example in the neurology of homo sapiens. That ultimately even atoms have some kind of residue of consciousness. This is different from those atoms being aware however, big difference, so the word choice is important. I also wouldn't then turn around and call this basal, natural field of consciousness "god", because that word means something entirely different for most of the world, and this is just being unnecessarily confusing.

It makes as much sense to worship this basal spectrum of consciousness as it does to worship the electromagnetic field. I mean go for it, whatever floats your boat, but don't act like your stance here is somehow based on evidence and reason.

Many people call many different things God, and most of those people use that word to refer to something other than the Unity of the cosmos. We already have words for that; for example, Tao is a wonderful word which captures exactly what you're getting at. Tao is definitely not God thought. And if you asked 10,000 people to define God, you might only get 200 people who answered the way you do, so this isn't really a valid popular appeal. You are being sloppy with words. Ask any theist whether their god is "the fundamental oneness of the universe; the basal intelligence at root of all reality" and they will say "No, I'm sorry, you must be thinking of something else. My God is Yaweh/Allah, the supreme conscious creator and ruler of the universe, and he has one prophet, Peace Be Upon Him".

Something akin to the Higgs Field is presumably not able to occassionally author books for the purposes of proscribing morality to one species of apes on earth.

 

Your characterization of how astrology come to be is not accurate. Astrology is based on observation and comparison. It is not a matter of people just deciding. I described how I came to my own position and it wasn't a matter of just deciding or just believing. The relative position of planets is calculable, don't think that this does not require exact discipline. The relative subjective state can be noted. Astrological influences are not overwhelming but simply influential. The place and time you are born into carries with it certain local and seasonal advantages and problems.

 

First point;
As I have asked many times but seem to be getting ignored, does not the countless subjective reports in itself constitute a valid data set?
If you are talking about an experience of/with God, how else do you think it should occur if not by direct subjective experience?
The problem with adopting this approach and attitude of dismissing subjective experience is that it does not account for the millions of people who have had these type of experiences, and really can only be applied in a case by case methodology.
Same holds true if you only are willing to consider certain experiences and not others.
I offered you that stuff concerning speaking in tongues, something reported as a direct experience of God/Holy Spirit, scientific research, admittedly limited, yet the results were intriguing because to the degree we can correlate brain activity to subjective experience, it would appear the phenomena is what it is reported to be in regards to what is going on in the brain and the subjective report.
You seemed to just dismiss it offhand.
Why?
That was a nugget of what you are after, was it not? A scientific approach to a subjective experience of God.

Second point;
Is there any reason this field of consciousness can't be "God", aside from it not fitting with the common, popular definition, which seems to be a sticking point for you.
It would probably help if you could elucidate on what criteria you would find acceptable for an "experience of God" in order for you to consider it.
What boxes need to be checked off in your mind to confirm an experience of God?

third point;
your remark about "ask any theist" again indicates much more of your bias and prejudice towards Judaism, Christianity and Islam more than any thing else.
It appears as if your issues aren't with God, spirituality or any of this crap, your issues are with the organized religions based on the Abrahamic stories/traditions.

As long as you hold to going against those antiquated religions and the muddled comprehension that pervades, than you will have long and happy battle.
If you broaden yourself beyond the silly asinine antics of the practitioners, you may find more than you anticipate.


again, I ask,
what boxes need to be checked off in your mind to answer the question of God?

 

Meanwhile you serve as a terrific example of someone not born under the bull who is very stubborn, and in fact you, like everyone on earth, possess the qualities of all of the zodiac.

We also all contain atoms and molecules and dna as well. That doesn't mean that everyone doesn't have a unique combination of these things that makes up who they are. An astrological chart does the same thing.

My "stubborness" is only a mirror to your own. I am only describing what I experience to be true, and you are determined to logically try to convince me that I'm wrong, because you refuse to be open minded to the idea of the actuality of what I talk about. You're very "what you see is what you get" which is what Taurus is all about, and I'm all about the secret knowledge and hidden realms, which is what Scorpio just so happens to be all about. Taurus and Scorpio also happen to be opposite signs.

As for the origins of Astrology, it goes all the way back to Ancient Egypt, and maybe even further. The roots of how the signs came to be what they are is still something that I'm exploring.

There was a famous warlord merchant in ancient arabia who had a very convincing encounter with the Archangel Gabriel. It was convincing enough that over a billion people on this planet structure their lives around what he "brought back"; but you're not a muslim, so you reject the claims of Muhammad. But how? Why? What is your reasoning for not being a muslim?

No, actually I'm not rejecting the claims of Muhammad. Stop projecting yourself onto me. You reject the claims of mystics. Not me.

Surely his spiritual experience with god HAD to be the case, since he claimed it was?

I can't really know. Only you are asserting that it must all be hearsay and bullshit, since you yourself aren't experiencing what he experienced.

I think this is where you are struggling and where you lack the experience and wherewithal to consider that it's possible for someone to value something in an ultimate way, for their entire lives, and for the fact of the matter to be that that person has wasted their life on that belief, insofar as it is false

are you open minded to that within yourself as well? If, as the future continues to unfold, we find Scientific evidence for the existence of Astrology, Magick, Kundalini, NDE's, that the brain isn't the creator of Consciousness, that the Universe is Self Aware, that the Aether is the nonlocal "stuff" that interacts different frequencies of the Cosmos etc...are you open-minded enough within yourself to accept that all that you hold dear and true and REAL to be false and incorrect? Of course you will respond with, "well yes, I just need the evidence". But would you REALLY be willing to be shown that you are wrong?

If you are really willing to show that you aren't invincible, then why are you STILL holding out on that Astrology reading?


Many people call many different things God, and most of those people use that word to refer to something other than the Unity of the cosmos. We already have words for that; for example, Tao is a wonderful word which captures exactly what you're getting at. Tao is definitely not God thought.

uh, yeah it is. You're ridiculous to be denying different spiritual words but as far as Tao goes, well that can slide. How come you aren't attempting to reveal the Scientific evidence of Tao? Why do you just accept it? Could it be that you just resonate with it Subjectively, in the same way that you are saying that this isn't evidence for any sort of truth?

 

I'm simply suggesting this ENTIRE time that Science may and should come to studying things such as Aether, Magick, the origins of Consciousness, Kundalini, etc. It may answer certain questions that Science can't answer as long as it deems all of this as "hearsay" and "pseudoscience". I have my own evidence for what I talk about because of my own practices, experiences, etc. And until Scientists start studying it, the only thing i can really do is be my own Scientist about it.

 

And where is your Scientific evidence for your experience of the fundamental Unity of the Cosmos? Why should I take your subjective experience as fact? You're telling me that I should be skeptical of anybody else's claims. Why shouldn't I be smirking at you and say to myself "man, he was tripping balls". Where is your evidence for the Unity of the Cosmos Scientifically? Where is there any evidence other than through your own direct SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE?

 

I second the request for better editing chinacat.

I find the most salient part of mr. Writers argument to be that ideas of god are not needed. That is true discounting the fact that for us direction is essential. We always choose with a guide and are hard wired to find substance in some authority.