Why does God not show him/her/itself?

Originally Posted by Busby

Just imagine how the world would change if God would speak quite clearly to all of the 8 billion Earth inhabitants at the same time and say something like this: On the 2nd of May this year the sun will appear in the sky as always but it will be green. It will stay green for one complete turn of the planet so that everyone can see it and so know, following my words to you all, that I am.

This would be no skin off God's nose and would allow us to get on with things. And as we also know changing the colour of the sun for a day would be easy, requiring only a miracle, of which there are many in the Bible, so having a decisive miracle 2000 years later could only be positive.

This would solve quite a number of obvious problems and we wouldn't be requested 'to believe', something which has caused and still causes friction and has no point anyway. Instead of believing (in whatever) we'd KNOW.

Then we could live our lives accordingly without fighting among ourselves as to who is right. Let's get rid of all 'beliefs', all superstitions, all religious traditions, all church buildings, all professional preachers, all funny clothes, hats, bishops and popes and their ilk - in fact let's rid ourselves of the whole pot and be able to look God directly in the eye.

Why should he/she/it want it to be otherwise.?????

I apologize for not reading your first post, Busby.

I see it now.

I think that if this were to happen, humans would still "stuff it up".

Respectfully yours, in friendship,

JL

[Busby]

Originally Posted by davidsun

Your Q assumes that (whatever) God (is) is a singular (all-power-full) 'creator' and that said singular creator thinks that what you regard as being 'a problem' is 'a problem' which said singular 'creator' consequently wishes, as you do, to dissolve.

Be that as it may or may not be , let me offer this counter-Q:

What if what you think of as 'desirable' is just your egotistical 'judgment' (based on the presumption that 'souls' would be 'better off' if the things you regard as 'undesirable' 'problems') is 'wrong' - IOW what if said 'problems' are really 'good' because they prompt and prod 'souls' to 'grow'?

Just because, davidsun, my Q assumes, on the surface, using a singular and all powerful creator in this case seemed the only a way to pose the question in an easy manner. (A Biblical way if you like). No matter what thoughts I have (or any of us have) the ego will play not only a part but the greatest part. We are - what all life is - a collection of continuingly aware empirical moments projected into matter.
As you may have seen between the lines, I am not a supporter of the 'we are here to learn/grow' philosophy. If I say that the so-called moral laws and their dependence not upon the universe (which has its own laws), but upon rules and regulations which are seemingly man-made throws any understand on the universe's behalf as to what is say 'good' or 'bad' out with the bath water.
What the universe says is 'here's your chance' make of it what you will it's up to you how it turns out. We are similar to little balls of electric energy and we flash and dim according to how we act - maybe even dependent to our nearness to the source.
Now I've unwittingly said something over which I'll have to ponder . never thought about that before!!!

[davidsun]

Originally Posted by Busby

Just because, davidsun, my Q assumes, on the surface, using a singular and all powerful creator in this case seemed the only a way to pose the question in an easy manner. (A Biblical way if you like). No matter what thoughts I have (or any of us have) the ego will play not only a part but the greatest part. We are - what all life is - a collection of continuingly aware empirical moments projected into matter.

As you may have seen between the lines, I am not a supporter of the 'we are here to learn/grow' philosophy. If I say that the so-called moral laws and their dependence not upon the universe (which has its own laws), but upon rules and regulations which are seemingly man-made throws any understand on the universe's behalf as to what is say 'good' or 'bad' out with the bath water.
What the universe says is 'here's your chance' make of it what you will it's up to you how it turns out. We are similar to little balls of electric energy and we flash and dim according to how we act - maybe even dependent to our nearness to the source.

Now I've unwittingly said something over which I'll have to ponder . never thought about that before!!!

Hi-ho, Busy:

I very much appreciate your more nuanced speculation, Busby, which I think explains (i.e. 'answers' the Q you posed) why you think a Biblical kind of 'God' does not 'show' 'Himself'.

Here's my hypothesis (from the treatise I am now writing) which explains how and why we (as souls) are here to learn and grow (so as to maximize the experience of Love and Joy) philosophy makes sense (to me, that is ) :

"As propositionally presented in the preceding chapter, The Entity of Life (which is The Flow of Creation), of which you and I and everyone else ‘in’*existence is a ‘vibrant’ part, is the outworking and feedback-infusing dynamism of the omnipresent, Love and Joy focused dynamic of The Essence of Life (which is Creativity Itself, a/k/a 'God'), such that said Essence and Entity are conjointly geared to express and (thereby) experience Love and Joy (which is the ‘core’ nature of said Essence) in every possible way to the utmost possible degree. Here now, in order to explicate the meanings of Jesus’ above-quoted statements, I articulate and expound upon the corollary implications of said proposition, to wit:

Every aspect of Life’s Presence is an emanation of and so, by virtue of the Power of said Essence (d/b/a our ‘Source’), is internally endowed with (1)*the capacity to be conscious to some degree, which capacity for consciousness, or ‘presence’ of mind, is what enables ‘it’ to experience whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is therefore capable of experiencing and so possibly responding to, and (2)*the motive‧ation, or spirit, to express ‘itself*’ by way of ‘causing’ (generating, transmitting, propagating, etc.) whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is thereby motivated to ‘make’ in response thereto. In full-zoom perspective, every nodal and multi-nodal feature of Life may be ‘seen’ to be a subsidiary soul, or gestalt of Life, which is facultatively imbued with mind and spirit by, and consequently both experiences and expresses ‘itself’ in relationship to and with other nodes of Life ‘in’ the matrixial framework* of, the supra-nodal SOUL (i.e. THE Mind·n·Spirit constellation, which many regard and relate to as having personal** attributes, though personal attributes actually derive therefrom) of THAT which is All That Is (a/k/a ‘Brahman’ or ‘God*’).

[Footnotes:
*“In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28)
**As channel-spoken and recorded in Ch.10 of The Bhagavad Gita: “I am the Seed of all being, … no creature moving or unmoving can live without Me.”]

Orthodox materialists dismiss this idea as being no more than an expression of wishful‑thinking because they believe that consciousness (i.e. mind), and motivation (i.e. intention, will, or spirit), must just be an epiphenomenon arising out of electro-chemical activity in molecular-chain linked ‘brain’ circuits, and that any differential discernment and directional movement must therefore simply be the result of innately unconscious and involitional matter-energy configurations (such as photons, atoms, molecules, DNA gene sequences and amalgams thereof) all essentially auto-mechanistically responding to the influence of equally mindless and innately purposeless tempero-spatial (nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational) power-‘fields’. They therefore ‘see’ what we know as Life as being no more than the cause-effect composite result of everything and everyone in the Universe just ‘acting out’ an essentially soulless, completely mathematics-governed script. Embedded in the above-articulated soul‧full☺ model of Life, however, is the possibility that, when and as the fantastically complex aggregation of associated beings which constitute the vehicular platform for one’s earthly experience and expression eventually disintegrates (in other words, when one’s body ‘dies’), the gestalt of one’s mind-and-spirit characterized soul may nevertheless continue to function as a disembodied psychospiritual entity which ‘lives on’ in the ‘bosom’ (idiomatically speaking☺) of THE superordinate, eternally ongoing because supra-physical, Mind·n·Spirit composed Matrix of All That Is. This is the logic that underlies otherwise nonsensical Biblical exhortations such as “Labor not for the ‘meat’ which perisheth, but for that ‘meat’ which endureth unto everlasting life.” (John 6:27), for instance.

[material referencing out of body and life after death experience omitted here to make this presentation 'short(er)' ]

The truth (which I present as a hypothesis to anyone who is presently agnostic in this regard) that one may potentially either integrally actualize the condition that Jesus referenced as ‘everlasting life’ as a coherent soul or irretrievably ‘lose’ one’s beingness and potential to do so as such, as a result of what one believes and so thinks, feels and does or doesn’t think, feel and do (as suggested in statements such as “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life,” and “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it,” for instance) may, I think, be functionally comprehended and profitably applied if and as one thoughtfully considers and contemplates the implications of the following reincarnational-possibility related propositions:

Unlike those soul configurations which inhabit and pursue Life’s objectives using more physiologically ‘hard-wired’ (and therefore less capable of elective information processing) ‘bodies’, we (‘we’, in this case, referencing souls ensconsed in relatively advanced kinds of physiological platforms, ‘advanced’, in this case, referencing greater ‘bandwidth’ accommodating information-reception, -processing and -transmission capabilities) can and so may cognitively apprehend the functional significance(s) of and operation*ally elect to relate to the constellational configurations of our own and others’ existential gestalts (or sub-aspects thereof) in ways of our own choosing (hence the phenomenon known as ‘free will’).

We have the potential to learn from and choose to change the patterns of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors based on the ‘feedback’ of personal experience so as to become more knowing and adept at creatively executing Life’s Love and Joy maximization aimed Source-code which (as postulated and argued in Chapter 1, at least) is the imperative that ubiquitously operates within all Being. Hence the development of greater power of discernment and capacity for discrimination (I don’t mean the stereotype-based meaning of the word, of course!) and, consequently, the increasingly selective execution of derivative choices such as ‘acceptance’, ‘trust’, ‘devotion’, ‘wariness’, ‘rejection’ and ‘banishment’,* for example, as well as increasing degrees of wisdom in terms of the ways in which souls choose to deploy their ‘will’ in such regards.

[Footnote:
* Note: This is just a boiled down categorical list of conceptually black-and-white thought-feeling-and-behavioral options which I have compiled to illustrate the point I am making. The ways which Mind and Spirit may choose to flow in are actually spectrumatically infinite, both in terms of variety and admixtural combination.]

The learning and consequent wisdom-development I speak of is in the direction of more fully appreciating the functional commonalities and connections between one’s ‘self’ and other ‘selves’ and so relationally engaging with them in ways which, more and more so in the long term, synergically augment and improve the quality of both one’s own and others’ experiences and expressions of Love and Joy, increasing the likelihood that not just one’s own but others’ wishes and desires to experience and express Love and Joy will be optimally fulfilled as well in the process. (Except if, when and as said others are so other-exploitive and self-aggrandizing that they sully and degrade the potential for the communal experience and expression of Love and Joy, in which case alternate kinds of relational responses, such as non-cooperation, counteraction and, when and to whatever degree this may be feasible, the unilateral imposition of possibly educational behavior-modifying constraints may be called for – for the same aiming-to-maximize-experience-and-expression-of-Love-and-Joy in Life’s Flow 'reason', of course!)

All of which explains our gradual progression (albeit, as a result of their selfishly biased calculus in the foregoing regards, not in every soul’s case, and, even in the cases of those who do progress in this regard, often in periodically regressive, learning-the-‘hard’-way fashion!) from totally selfish to familial to clannish to tribal to national to global to universal and, finally, to cosmically self-transcendent psychospiritual ‘i’dentifications and corollary choices and behaviors, meaning that folks increasingly think, feel and believe and so conscientiously act knowing that, though each and every individual and group is unique and so differs from others in significant ways, one’s ‘self*’ and all other ‘selves’ are really integral expressions of Life Itself – in other words, ultimately knowing that, despite apparent differences, we are all relationally connected aspects of the same (pertaining to the Universe we are in, at least) Cosmic Being-Doing!

[more digressive material omitted here]

It is the process of soul growth (development, expansion, evolution, remembering – there are any number of ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon) which I have just sketched out that the saying “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” aphoristically references. The Life that is thereby ‘found’ (i.e. experientially realized) is of the cosmically omnipresent, transcend*entally expansive kind (as differentiated from the selfish, hence transitorily ‘mortal’, kind which materialists mistakenly believe to be the only meaning of the word). It is one’s selfishness which must be subordinated – one might therefore say it has to be voluntarily given and thereby, in some sense, ‘lost’ – in service of said time-space-and-matter-transcending Life for a soul to psychospiritually splice into and dovetail its existential expression with our Entity’s (i.e. some label/call said Entity Christ) Being-n-Doing and live on as a fully integrated aspect thereof thereafter.

Functionally grokking just how coherently individuating souls may learn and eventually develop to the point where they fully align their existential expressions with and devote themselves to further augmenting The Flow of (all!) Life and so become ‘everlasting’ components of Its Being-n-Doing, as well as how they may irretrievably ‘lose’ the possibility of ever doing and becoming so, requires that the entire process be placed and viewed in the context of a reincarnational idea-scheme, however (as suggested earlier)."

[Busby]

Originally Posted by davidsun

Hi-ho, Busy:

I very much appreciate your more nuanced speculation, Busby, which I think explains (i.e. 'answers' the Q you posed) why you think a Biblical kind of 'God' does not 'show' 'Himself'.

Here's my hypothesis (from the treatise I am now writing) which explains how and why we (as souls) are here to learn and grow (so as to maximize the experience of Love and Joy) philosophy makes sense (to me, that is ) :

"As propositionally presented in the preceding chapter, The Entity of Life (which is The Flow of Creation), of which you and I and everyone else ‘in’*existence is a ‘vibrant’ part, is the outworking and feedback-infusing dynamism of the omnipresent, Love and Joy focused dynamic of The Essence of Life (which is Creativity Itself, a/k/a 'God'), such that said Essence and Entity are conjointly geared to express and (thereby) experience Love and Joy (which is the ‘core’ nature of said Essence) in every possible way to the utmost possible degree. Here now, in order to explicate the meanings of Jesus’ above-quoted statements, I articulate and expound upon the corollary implications of said proposition, to wit:

Every aspect of Life’s Presence is an emanation of and so, by virtue of the Power of said Essence (d/b/a our ‘Source’), is internally endowed with (1)*the capacity to be conscious to some degree, which capacity for consciousness, or ‘presence’ of mind, is what enables ‘it’ to experience whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is therefore capable of experiencing and so possibly responding to, and (2)*the motive‧ation, or spirit, to express ‘itself*’ by way of ‘causing’ (generating, transmitting, propagating, etc.) whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is thereby motivated to ‘make’ in response thereto. In full-zoom perspective, every nodal and multi-nodal feature of Life may be ‘seen’ to be a subsidiary soul, or gestalt of Life, which is facultatively imbued with mind and spirit by, and consequently both experiences and expresses ‘itself’ in relationship to and with other nodes of Life ‘in’ the matrixial framework* of, the supra-nodal SOUL (i.e. THE Mind·n·Spirit constellation, which many regard and relate to as having personal** attributes, though personal attributes actually derive therefrom) of THAT which is All That Is (a/k/a ‘Brahman’ or ‘God*’).

[Footnotes:
*“In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28)
**As channel-spoken and recorded in Ch.10 of The Bhagavad Gita: “I am the Seed of all being, … no creature moving or unmoving can live without Me.”]

Orthodox materialists dismiss this idea as being no more than an expression of wishful‑thinking because they believe that consciousness (i.e. mind), and motivation (i.e. intention, will, or spirit), must just be an epiphenomenon arising out of electro-chemical activity in molecular-chain linked ‘brain’ circuits, and that any differential discernment and directional movement must therefore simply be the result of innately unconscious and involitional matter-energy configurations (such as photons, atoms, molecules, DNA gene sequences and amalgams thereof) all essentially auto-mechanistically responding to the influence of equally mindless and innately purposeless tempero-spatial (nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational) power-‘fields’. They therefore ‘see’ what we know as Life as being no more than the cause-effect composite result of everything and everyone in the Universe just ‘acting out’ an essentially soulless, completely mathematics-governed script. Embedded in the above-articulated soul‧full☺ model of Life, however, is the possibility that, when and as the fantastically complex aggregation of associated beings which constitute the vehicular platform for one’s earthly experience and expression eventually disintegrates (in other words, when one’s body ‘dies’), the gestalt of one’s mind-and-spirit characterized soul may nevertheless continue to function as a disembodied psychospiritual entity which ‘lives on’ in the ‘bosom’ (idiomatically speaking☺) of THE superordinate, eternally ongoing because supra-physical, Mind·n·Spirit composed Matrix of All That Is. This is the logic that underlies otherwise nonsensical Biblical exhortations such as “Labor not for the ‘meat’ which perisheth, but for that ‘meat’ which endureth unto everlasting life.” (John 6:27), for instance.

[material referencing out of body and life after death experience omitted here to make this presentation 'short(er)' ]

The truth (which I present as a hypothesis to anyone who is presently agnostic in this regard) that one may potentially either integrally actualize the condition that Jesus referenced as ‘everlasting life’ as a coherent soul or irretrievably ‘lose’ one’s beingness and potential to do so as such, as a result of what one believes and so thinks, feels and does or doesn’t think, feel and do (as suggested in statements such as “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life,” and “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it,” for instance) may, I think, be functionally comprehended and profitably applied if and as one thoughtfully considers and contemplates the implications of the following reincarnational-possibility related propositions:

Unlike those soul configurations which inhabit and pursue Life’s objectives using more physiologically ‘hard-wired’ (and therefore less capable of elective information processing) ‘bodies’, we (‘we’, in this case, referencing souls ensconsed in relatively advanced kinds of physiological platforms, ‘advanced’, in this case, referencing greater ‘bandwidth’ accommodating information-reception, -processing and -transmission capabilities) can and so may cognitively apprehend the functional significance(s) of and operation*ally elect to relate to the constellational configurations of our own and others’ existential gestalts (or sub-aspects thereof) in ways of our own choosing (hence the phenomenon known as ‘free will’).

We have the potential to learn from and choose to change the patterns of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors based on the ‘feedback’ of personal experience so as to become more knowing and adept at creatively executing Life’s Love and Joy maximization aimed Source-code which (as postulated and argued in Chapter 1, at least) is the imperative that ubiquitously operates within all Being. Hence the development of greater power of discernment and capacity for discrimination (I don’t mean the stereotype-based meaning of the word, of course!) and, consequently, the increasingly selective execution of derivative choices such as ‘acceptance’, ‘trust’, ‘devotion’, ‘wariness’, ‘rejection’ and ‘banishment’,* for example, as well as increasing degrees of wisdom in terms of the ways in which souls choose to deploy their ‘will’ in such regards.

[Footnote:
* Note: This is just a boiled down categorical list of conceptually black-and-white thought-feeling-and-behavioral options which I have compiled to illustrate the point I am making. The ways which Mind and Spirit may choose to flow in are actually spectrumatically infinite, both in terms of variety and admixtural combination.]

The learning and consequent wisdom-development I speak of is in the direction of more fully appreciating the functional commonalities and connections between one’s ‘self’ and other ‘selves’ and so relationally engaging with them in ways which, more and more so in the long term, synergically augment and improve the quality of both one’s own and others’ experiences and expressions of Love and Joy, increasing the likelihood that not just one’s own but others’ wishes and desires to experience and express Love and Joy will be optimally fulfilled as well in the process. (Except if, when and as said others are so other-exploitive and self-aggrandizing that they sully and degrade the potential for the communal experience and expression of Love and Joy, in which case alternate kinds of relational responses, such as non-cooperation, counteraction and, when and to whatever degree this may be feasible, the unilateral imposition of possibly educational behavior-modifying constraints may be called for – for the same aiming-to-maximize-experience-and-expression-of-Love-and-Joy in Life’s Flow 'reason', of course!)

All of which explains our gradual progression (albeit, as a result of their selfishly biased calculus in the foregoing regards, not in every soul’s case, and, even in the cases of those who do progress in this regard, often in periodically regressive, learning-the-‘hard’-way fashion!) from totally selfish to familial to clannish to tribal to national to global to universal and, finally, to cosmically self-transcendent psychospiritual ‘i’dentifications and corollary choices and behaviors, meaning that folks increasingly think, feel and believe and so conscientiously act knowing that, though each and every individual and group is unique and so differs from others in significant ways, one’s ‘self*’ and all other ‘selves’ are really integral expressions of Life Itself – in other words, ultimately knowing that, despite apparent differences, we are all relationally connected aspects of the same (pertaining to the Universe we are in, at least) Cosmic Being-Doing!

[more digressive material omitted here]

It is the process of soul growth (development, expansion, evolution, remembering – there are any number of ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon) which I have just sketched out that the saying “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” aphoristically references. The Life that is thereby ‘found’ (i.e. experientially realized) is of the cosmically omnipresent, transcend*entally expansive kind (as differentiated from the selfish, hence transitorily ‘mortal’, kind which materialists mistakenly believe to be the only meaning of the word). It is one’s selfishness which must be subordinated – one might therefore say it has to be voluntarily given and thereby, in some sense, ‘lost’ – in service of said time-space-and-matter-transcending Life for a soul to psychospiritually splice into and dovetail its existential expression with our Entity’s (i.e. some label/call said Entity Christ) Being-n-Doing and live on as a fully integrated aspect thereof thereafter.

Functionally grokking just how coherently individuating souls may learn and eventually develop to the point where they fully align their existential expressions with and devote themselves to further augmenting The Flow of (all!) Life and so become ‘everlasting’ components of Its Being-n-Doing, as well as how they may irretrievably ‘lose’ the possibility of ever doing and becoming so, requires that the entire process be placed and viewed in the context of a reincarnational idea-scheme, however (as suggested earlier)."

davidsun, thanks.
Your as above philosophy mirrors to a great extent mine. Or my philosophy mirrors yours - to keep the keel even! In essence I'd write something very similar, however (and it's always the case), 8 billion people will tell you that each POV is different but just as valid. It is quite obvious, or at least so it seems that each of us is the centre of the (same?)universe. Our awareness in this 'condition' appears to be enclosed by what someone called 'a tight shoe', our consciousness therefore would tend to be relative to our shoe size if you'll excuse the analogy. Taking the shoe off allows expansion, it's more than possible that with death the tight shoe is removed. This would be for me the starting point of any discussion as to how awareness works. You said you removed the parts about NDEs and other higher states of consciousness from your treatise, deeming it unneeded. But it's exactly this super chance we have now to compile information which we need to be heeding in this computer age - urgently. There are those who say we live in an information universe and we accept it as such, but that's only one aspect.
Personally I have a problem with some words, the words in fact with which we all have problems - God, Soul, Spirit, Divine, Belief etc., all words which can never be defined as are many others, we all know what cement is, but ask an expert and we have a shock.
So until there is some sort of breakthrough - similar to the one made by quantum physics (which raised and dashed all our hopes) we are stuck with a myriad of possibilities. These possibilities are reflected in what we call beliefs. That's all they are too, (beliefs) nothing else - we know nothing.
So for me it's intuition, the inner feeling that things are formed in a way in which I am involved, in which we and everything else is involved. Intuition is formed in the world of thought and is a culmination of experience. As I slowly understand that there is absolutely nothing which can fall under the term of 'supernatural' my instinct - the physical understanding and my intuition my mental understanding tells me that only mind and matter have a place in contemplation.
By this I don't mean there is no God or cause - rather the opposite, this cause, this 'mind at large' is best observed as that attribute we call imagination.
This explains a lot of things.

[davidsun]

Originally Posted by Busby

davidsun, thanks.
Your as above philosophy mirrors to a great extent mine. Or my philosophy mirrors yours - to keep the keel even! In essence I'd write something very similar, however (and it's always the case), 8 billion people will tell you that each POV is different but just as valid. It is quite obvious, or at least so it seems that each of us is the centre of the (same?)universe. Our awareness in this 'condition' appears to be enclosed by what someone called 'a tight shoe', our consciousness therefore would tend to be relative to our shoe size if you'll excuse the analogy. Taking the shoe off allows expansion, it's more than possible that with death the tight shoe is removed. This would be for me the starting point of any discussion as to how awareness works. You said you removed the parts about NDEs and other higher states of consciousness from your treatise, deeming it unneeded. But it's exactly this super chance we have now to compile information which we need to be heeding in this computer age - urgently. There are those who say we live in an information universe and we accept it as such, but that's only one aspect.
Personally I have a problem with some words, the words in fact with which we all have problems - God, Soul, Spirit, Divine, Belief etc., all words which can never be defined as are many others, we all know what cement is, but ask an expert and we have a shock.
So until there is some sort of breakthrough - similar to the one made by quantum physics (which raised and dashed all our hopes) we are stuck with a myriad of possibilities. These possibilities are reflected in what we call beliefs. That's all they are too, (beliefs) nothing else - we know nothing.
So for me it's intuition, the inner feeling that things are formed in a way in which I am involved, in which we and everything else is involved. Intuition is formed in the world of thought and is a culmination of experience. As I slowly understand that there is absolutely nothing which can fall under the term of 'supernatural' my instinct - the physical understanding and my intuition my mental understanding tells me that only mind and matter have a place in contemplation.
By this I don't mean there is no God or cause - rather the opposite, this cause, this 'mind at large' is best observed as that attribute we call imagination.
This explains a lot of things.

High-Five Busy - we are 'on the same (conceptual) page' now! Way more in 'snych' than I imagined!! Wonder-full!!!

I only 'removed' the OOBE, NDE and REincarnational accounts references (which include links) from the sequence of paragraphs I posted here. They are a 'key' part of the chapter I am composing and nearing completion of.

Since time is (now) 'short', on our planet, that is , if you (or anyone else want to) send me your email address via a PM, I would be happy to email you a pdf-converted copy of the chapter as it (now) 'sits' , as an attachment.

If not, since I do intend to upload the chapter to my website and post a link to it here when its is completed (maybe a month from now??? - it is slow going sometimes!), you can wait for it.

[Busby]

I'll wait, davidsun, although time is indeed getting short I'm not panicking yet! Anyway thanks.

I'd like to recommend two books to you - amongst the best I've ever read:

Kundalini - The Evolutionary Energy in Man, by Gopi Krishna
ISBN 978-1-57062-280-9 Shambhala Publications
www.shambhala.com

Brief Peeks Beyond, by Bernardo Kastrup
IBSN 978-1-78535-018-4
iff Books

Here's to full glasses!

[davidsun]

Originally Posted by Busby

I'll wait, davidsun, although time is indeed getting short I'm not panicking yet! Anyway thanks.

I'd like to recommend two books to you - amongst the best I've ever read:

Kundalini - The Evolutionary Energy in Man, by Gopi Krishna
ISBN 978-1-57062-280-9 Shambhala Publications
www.shambhala.com

Brief Peeks Beyond, by Bernardo Kastrup
IBSN 978-1-78535-018-4
iff Books

Here's to full glasses!

The kundalini paradigm doesn't work for me because I experience 'awakening' as a kind of "from my mind" and "from my heart" stemming from my actually relating to what I see and sense is going on in and around me phenomenon, and think, feel, believe that 'vital' sex/sexual energy is basically a physicality based vestige of eons of physical-power evolution and therefore best just psychospiritually left 'behind'.

I can tell from seeing its Table of Contents courtesy of Amazon.com that Kastrup's conceptualizations are in tight in synch with mine, and so would recommend that book to anyone interested in the matters under discussion.

Glad to hear you are not 'panicking'. My writng is aimed at presenting the coming 'storm' as a positive opportunity ...

The glass is indeed full of possibilities - here's another excerpt from my writing (which I may have quoted before - don't keep track of such thangs. ) !

"The short version of ‘the full story’ is that, with the benefit of having both (‘unsuccessful’ and ‘successful’) kinds of experiences, souls may incrementally become aware of the ins and outs of the multivarious kinds of liabilities which stem from short-sighted selfishness and (so) in due course choose as well as manage to transcend any and all selfish-‘i’dentity associated inclinations such that they eventually become completely devoted to optimizing and augmenting the Entity of Life’s Love and Joy Process above and beyond their ‘own’ selfish one and (so) from that point on live in a state of ‘at oneness’, i.e. in ‘conjunction’, with said Ever-Ongoing Process and psychospiritually be and do so forever, i.e. ‘eternally’, thereafter. The alternative possibility in this regard, of course, being that souls may completely (capital ‘F’!) Fail to do and be so.

The latter possibility derives from the fact that, if and as a soul reacts, as all selfish-ego bound (hence ‘immature’ in incarnational terms) souls inevitably sometimes do, to the frustration(s) and disappointment(s) of personal wishes, hopes, and expectations in an unduly desire for selfish-gratification intensifying (hence) other-forsaking manner – the idea that Life presents us with*a series of ‘tests’ which we may either ‘pass’ or not in this regard pertains here! – and if such all too human directional tendency isn’t somehow neutralized and reversed – note if your experience is presently hellish: horrible-to-go-through experiences variously labeled ‘dark nights of the soul’, ‘hitting bottom’ and ‘ego-death’ will in retrospect be seen to have actually having been ‘neutralizing’ boons in this regard!– a soul may become so mentally and emotionally ‘i’solated that its capacity and inclination to experience and express Love and Joy psychospiritually shrinks and shrivels (i.e. devolves) to the point where it becomes unloving and unjoyful in relation to Life and others that are a part of It. Since the Essence of Life is Love and Joy and that is what our Entity is actually the living expression of, what ‘happens’ then, of course is that such soul just ‘blinks out’, or ‘vanishes’ from the ‘field’ of Life, as a psychospiritual ‘unit’, thereby completely ‘losing’ the possibility of ever incarnating again as a nodal entity. There is no ‘kernel’ of Love and Joy left which can then possibly incarnate and thereby evolve and develop to the point where it consciously integrates with and thereafter coherently lives on as a communal ‘member’ of the ‘Body’ of Life.

This final, because then and thereafter absolutely irremediable, ‘loss’ is what is referenced as the ‘second death’ in The Book of Revelation which, notwithstanding the fact that said book distorts the truth by conflating the personage of Jesus with The Entity of Life (a/k/a Christ), as well as by projecting all anti-Christ ‘wrongdoing’ to be the work of a singularly evil, mythological Satan (alas, ‘channeled’ visions and sayings cannot help but be ‘shaped’ and ‘colored’ by the belief-lens of the ‘channeler’!), nevertheless appropriately, in my opinion, puts such and related phenomena in reincarnation-referencing perspective, to wit: “I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast [the ‘beast’, of course, just being gross selfishness], neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be [i.e., they shall reincarnate as] priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand [figuratively speaking, now!] years. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan [i.e., the spirit of unmitigated selfishness] shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth … to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they [i.e., the huge number of unduly selfish people you see running rampant all over the globe today!] went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city.” (Revelation 20:4-9)

While I’m at it, in relation to the eschatological vision presented in said Book of Revelation, let me also say that, given the horribleness of the horrors and and miserableness of the miseries such ‘deceived’ (by the ‘dictates’ of selfishness) folks spawn, it is more than understandable why many would wish and project that perpetrators in said regards will experience and suffer the most hellish kinds of torments imaginable in retribution before their souls are annihilated by way of the above referenced ‘second death’ (following their bodies’ physical one), as grotesquely fantasized, for instance, in: “And fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever. … And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” (Revelation 20:9-15)

An equally grotesque, retributional wish-fulfilling fantasy that selfish ‘sinners’ suffer the worst imaginable fate – albeit in this case, leaving the issue of what ultimately ‘happens’ to such souls schematically unresolved: a ‘fate’ which continues to spiral downward without end! – appears in Ch.16 of The Bhagavad Gita: “Puffed up by power and inordinate conceit, swayed by lust and wrath, these wicked people hate Me Who am within them, as I am within all. Those who thus hate Me, who are cruel, the dregs of mankind, I condemn them to a continuous, miserable and godless rebirth. So reborn, they spend life after life, enveloped in delusion. And they never reach Me, … but degenerate into still lower forms of life.” Both this and the fore-referenced ‘final judgment’ scenarios are clearly negative-emotion ‘loaded’ and (so) thematically punitive. Such negativity and punitiveness don’t make sense in the context of Jesus’ vision and teaching (presented and discussed in the preceding chapter) that Love and Joy constitute Life’s programmatic Source ‘code’, to wit that ‘God’ is a beneficently-inclined ‘Father’ from which all Life springs, however.

This is not to say that the Flow of Life’s Love and Joy experience and expression doesn’t fork negatively (relatively speaking) in the case of folks who attitudes, intentions and behaviors in relation to other aspects of Life or**Life Itself are value-negate·ing. Universally operative psychospiritual dynamics – sometimes attributed to ‘The Law of Attraction’; sometimes to ‘Karma’; “With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you” (Mark*4:24) is how Jesus simply stated it – ensure that “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap!” (Galatians 6:7) The point I am making is that the disintegration and existential cessation of a gestalt of Love and Joy as a nodal soul is really no more than just that: an ‘i’dentity-dissipating ‘happening’ wherein and whereby the elements that constitute the pattern of a psychospiritual sub-‘entity’ are dispersed and recombinantly recycled, such that a soul’s components get ‘dissolved’ and ‘absorbed’ into and so, albeit no longer coherently, become part of the beingnesses of other aspects of Life in the context of the absolutely positive Being (i.e. Entity) of our Life-Matrix wherein everyone and everything in existence derives from the same Source and so partakes of the same original ‘blessing’: “Ye [are] the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45) There is no 'zero' in this regard, let alone something 'negative relative to that, in other words. Analogous to what physicists believe to be the case with physical matter-n-energy, soulful beingness can never really be ‘lost’ (albeit, as just stated, psychospiritual configurations can get reshuffled to the point where any semblance of ‘i’dentity is terminated, so thinking and speaking, as Jesus did, about the possibility of ‘losing’ one’s soul, in this case meaning the coherency of one’s psychospiritual gestalt, may nevertheless to be a functional way of considering and evaluating available choices in face of the recycling dynamic which is operationally part and parcel of the process of ‘higher’ psychospiritual evolution (i.e. soul-‘ascension’), as spoken of in this chapter)."

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by Busby

Brief Peeks Beyond, by Bernardo Kastrup
IBSN 978-1-78535-018-4
iff Books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G6vL8bpoUU


His 57 minute youtube Part 1

The sun turning green.
The sun has been radiating so most plant life can be green. This life which comes from the ONE I call God formulated this life plan in the beginning and it keeps ticking away and is such a miracle that when I offer thanks to whatever life form I am to gain nourishment from, I pause and thank my Creator that this life form has been in the death and rebirth of seed for generation and generation since He created it that way.
Then take the sky. Really it is dark but yet it is blue.What? Miracle. A force shield that keeps us safe.What? Our force shield reflects the blue of the ocean? Miracle. How many other universal planets that we know of have our life continuing properties? Just the right distance from the sun for just the right temperature and a self cleaner for the water we need for life. Miracle.
Miracle after miracle can be seen if one looks without prejudgment.
I could go on but I must go see some miracles.
Expect a miracle because it's happening all the time.

Some simple people 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. (1)

I am converted into Him in such a way that He makes me one Being with Himself-not a similar being. By the living God, it is true that there is no distinction ! (2)

3809 | Meister Eckhart