Truthseeker
Non-debating member when I can help myself
Okay. Just a different viewpoint from mine. In my view God is free to favor whoever He wants to.
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Does it make sense if God stops talking?
- Thread starter InvestigateTruth
- Start date
dybmh
ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים
Therefore, the direct 'connection' to 'God' you wrote about is a direct connection to a subjective inner experience. That is clearly NOT the god that was being referenced in the OP. Did you know that?
That is remarkably incomplete. Drive a car with your eyes closed and let us know what happens.
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Your quality of experienced life decreases rapidly?
dybmh
ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים
You left out the word "objectively".
If you say so then why did you reply to the OP in the way you did?
How can you reject someone else's inner subjective experience as false. Your own position has equal credibility. And you failed to answer the question I asked.
The is direct connection you wrote about is nothing more than an inner subjective experience? Yes or No?
No. It only subjectively decreases.
Once again. There are no objective experience. I have never had one.
You agree or disagree?
I'm trying not to write a book in reply. It is relatively easy to separate both kinds of people from the ordinary ones who are motivated by the desire for fame, power etc. So, for example, if someone gives money to the poor, do they just do it perhaps anonymously or do they create an institution, send out press releases and bask in the approval of people.
Beyond that, it's hard. Everyday life is full of deciding whether a doctor is really knowledgeable and skilled, whether a teacher know her stuff and so forth. We might talk to others, search the internet, look at the person's background etc. Since that is the case, how much more is needed for an issue like this.
My view is that starting with a skeptical but open mind is a good place to start. So reading what a person has written, talking to those who know or knew the person if they're still around and so forth is a good idea.
Another step can be to know what figures such as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna and Rama were reported to have been like and have done. This of course is an issue of history vs legend, but there should be some common elements from various traditions.
In my view, to be God is to be omniscient, all knowing. That knowing would manifest in ways that are not explainable through ordinary means. There is, for example, the story in the Quran where Moses went on a journey with Khizr. Khizr did some apparently evil deeds but later explained the reasons from his knowledge. This avenue can be an issue for historical figures because what we read is often hagiography at best and not accurate history.
dybmh
ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים
The decrease is a direct result of feedback from objective phenomena outside the mind. The relationship between the inner subjective experience to the objective phenomena outside the mind is so closely related that the inner subjective experience is highly and specifically detailed and predictable based on the objective external phenomena. It is hand-in-glove.
If one closes their eyes and drives a car the outcome is predictable. If there were no objective phenomena outside the mind, then the consequences would not be so extremely predictable based on the objective phenomena.
But you interact with objective external phenomena during your waking hours eacch and everyday.
However I expected this sort of response.
Lacking any external phenomena outside the mind, who are the "anyone" in your assertion above? Do they have any inherent reality? Not only is "God" in your assertion an inner-subjective experience nothing more, but the others in your assertion are also the product of your own mind, nothing more?
What does this ^^ actually mean? You're talking about yourself and only about yourself. You are the 'God". You are the "anyone". There is no "God" there is no "anyone". There is only you. Correct?
What seperates unity from non-duality?
You are jumping to the strange conclusion that I believe that the inference of an external world based on our subjective experience set is erroneous. I have never said that. I am not a "mind only" idealist.
I have said
a) All experiences we ever have are inner subjective experience. This to dismiss something as "merely" and inner subjective experience is incoherent.
b) Sound inferences about the nature of the perceived objects of inner experience (like the external world, mathematical structures or "god's") have to made based on careful analysis of the subjective experiences we have. And those inferences about objects of our experiences have to tested based on how useful they are and how predictive they are of future experiences that we will have.
My argument is NOT that external world does not exist, but rather that what are called "God" or "spiritual" experiences also pass the usefulness, repeatability and predictiveness criteria when the features of these experiences are carefully analysed....just like ordinary experiences.
dybmh
ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים
None the less in this context the inner subjective experience of a god needs to be distinguished from external phenomena of a god. Lacking this, if 'utility' is the benchmark, then anyone can use their imagination in a useful manner and label that 'direct connection to God'.
This isn't a problem, other than being perceived as silly, until another's concept of god is rejected. The 'direct connection' to an inner subjective experience is no more credible than the claims of any other individual who is having a direction connection with their own inner subjective experience. Further, conflating a direct connection to this inner subjective experience with an encounter with a god, specifically THE God of Abraham, is remarkably ignorant of the attributes of this specific god.
This is why I am asking you: "What are you **actually** talking about?" When you use the word 'God' in this context, do you know what that means? When you use the words 'direct connection' to that specific God do you know what that means?
The conclusion is not strange at all since you did not answer the questions I have asked directly, instead choosing to avoid them. And when presented with an example of the inherent reality of external phenomena ( driving a car with ones eyes closed ), you repeatedly avoided the existence of external phenomena instead focusing exclusively on the inner subjective experience.
All of this, imo, should have been very quickly and easily clarified when I first asked.
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dybmh
ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים
Unity includes and accepts the inherent multiplicity. Non-duality denies it.
You can't produce a team if all the others are being denied inherent reality, and all of their talents are being denied. Clarity comes from recognizing benefits and liabilities while simultaneously considering the conditions which can cause those benefits to flip into liabilities and how the liabilities can be flipped into assets. All of that is team-building, aka, bridge-building. None of that can happen in non-dual oblivion.
And ultimately if the desire is for moksha, then there is no point in building a bridge. There is no care at all for this physical world, only resentment.
The Bridge Builder by Will Allen Dromgoole | Poetry Foundation
An old man going a lone highway,
An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”
From my point of view, the chasm has inherent realilty, and the youth MUST pass this way. I am commited to building and maintaining that bridge, not denying the inherent reality of the chasm, the youth, and their need to cross safely in favor of the oblivion that exists in the mind/self/Self. That's what moksha is.
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Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Baha'is believe in the God of Abraham, so we believe that the attributes of God preclude an encounter with God.
Anyone can claim they have a 'direct connection to God' but I do not believe that is possible, given the attributes of the God I believe in.
dybmh
ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים
A direct connection to the God of Abraham = massive internal damage
Genesis 3
"So he drove out the man; and he placed Kerubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way of the tree of life."
That was your reply to, "How does one distinguish between the "direct communication" with "God" and "direct communication" with "a reflection of themself."
I agree with you. It was experience that revealed to me that my intuition that I was experiencing the Holy Spirit during church services was false and that I was only experiencing my own mind, that is, mistaking endogenous experience from received or sensed information from without. The revelation came when I left my first congregation (I became a Christian at about 18 years old), and had stumbled upon a gifted and charismatic preacher. A few years later, upon discharge from the military and a return home to another state, I tried a half dozen congregations, all of them dead by comparison.
It was then that I realized that my experience wasn't of a spirit but the product of my own mind in the hands of this preacher. This led to my leaving the religion and a return to atheistic humanism. Since then, I understand such claims of seeing God or sensing God or hearing God as
Agree again. I posted on this recently in response to, "To me real "truth" can not be stated in our language because every utterance can be parsed in an infinite number of ways."
Perhaps you've drunk from the post-modernist cup too deeply. A little bit of epistemic nihilism is helpful. Too much is disabling.
Postmodernism is the idea that early Enlightenment scientist and philosophers were deceived by their ideas about objective reality and truth. Reality, according to postmodernists, is a conceptual construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language. This point also applies to the investigation of past events by historians and to the description of social institutions, structures, or practices by social scientists. All knowledge is fuzzy, and some say that there is no such thing as Truth. They tend to be anti-science. Also, for postmodernists, reason and logic too are merely conceptual constructs and are therefore valid only within the established intellectual traditions in which they are used.
In summary, language creates illusion, truth doesn't exist, and the program of science including historical and social science is doomed to failure. I don't deny that there is some merit there, but one can see how this leads to an endorsement of fanciful and fuzzy thinking and what I called epistemic nihilism, which is so extreme in many that they entirely distrust whatever their lying eyes show them.