Does the universe need intelligence to order it?

[Looncall]

I understand godnotgod and I realize I am on ignore by the loon. Oh fun!

No, no, the loon is paying close attention. He just hasn't had a chance to formulate a clear reply yet.

The loon understands godnotgod fine; he just doesn't buy what's being offered for sale.

 

[godnotgod]

This is what makes so many of your posts so absurd, namely that you take something that is really a belief that you have and then elevate it to the level of a proven fact. How can one discuss much of anything when you make such a ridiculous leap of faith? "Belief" is not the same as "evidence" nor "fact".

It is neither belief nor proven fact. Either you see it or you don't. IOW, it is an experience in consciousness. It cannot be a belief because belief requires thinking. Direct seeing into the nature of things is not thinking.

What on earth are you doing during your meditation sessions?

Science is a reductionist approach to reality, so if anything, it is science that is taking reality and reducing it to the level of 'proven fact'. Unfortunately, what science doesn't get is that proven fact is not reality. It is about reality. You cannot get to the music by dismantling the piano. Reality, like music, is an experience in consciousness. It is not an object that can be isolated in the lab and put into jars of formaldehyde, nor encapsulated via mathematics. Science thinks it can capture the wind in a box.

 

[godnotgod]

Word salad. Obfuscatory bafflegab.

I notice you have not yet told us what you think consciousness is, yet you continue to prate about it.

From where do you suppose Everything originates? Are you familiar with theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss and 'a universe from nothing'?

I already told you what consciousness is: it is the default state of awareness, without thought, that sees things as they are. When mind comes into play, it sees things as it thinks they are. Mind not only is self created, it then creates artificial divisions, such as 'this' and 'that', 'here' and 'there', 'material' and 'non-material', 'inside' and 'outside'. This is conditioned mind, in which a conceptual overlay is placed over reality, and then seen as fact.

Now, what is it about the above that your conditioned (knee jerk) mind sees as 'word salad' and 'bafflegab'? Tell me so I can clarify it for you.

 

[godnotgod]

You are making some good points.
It is interesting, is it not, that we cannot see God nor can we see Consciousness. It is interesting that there are science theories out there that say the universe, at its smallest level, is Consciousness, and nothing else. It is interesting that we cannot see the part of us that is really the 'I'. Neither can we see the part of God that is really 'I'. So we can neither prove, in a material way, that we exist or God exists.

Only the mind that doesn't know must try to prove the unprovable. The moment one attempts such proof, God is dead. That is what both the theologians and the scientists think they must do. The mystic sees no need to do so, because there is nothing to prove. There is only this eternal Present Moment, and if you are not with it, you are not fully alive, because your mind is in the dead past or in the non-existent future, such as science/theology are.

The issue is not whether we can prove the existence of God, but whether we can see who, or what it is that is attempting to do so. As Deepak Chopra said: 'the scientist is God pretending to be a scientist'. Likewise, the atheist is God pretending he does'nt exist, while the theist (no offense) is God pretending he is someone else. Only the mystic achieves divine union in which he and the divine nature merge as 'dye dissolved in water'. The dilemma is that we already are THAT, but fail to realize it, so expert is the illusion that we are not THAT. And because the illusion is so expertly crafted, we have the history of the world, of THAT pretending to be all the characters, playing them simultaneously, and resulting in a 'troubled voyage in calm weather'.

When THAT awakens, it sees things as they are, rather than how the delusioned mind thinks they are. That is when spiritual awakening occurs.

 

[godnotgod]

Yes, that's the impression I have. Continually hinting at some knowledge which the rest of us don't have, then side-stepping when challenged to say what this knowledge actually is. I'm bored with it.

Would you like some candy?

Do you seriously expect the universe to jump out and explain itself to you, one thing at a time?

child: 'Daddy, why is the sky blue?'
father: 'Well, because of the oxygen, son'
child: 'Oh'
*****

child: 'Grampa monk, what color is that tree?'
monk: 'Why, it's the color that it is'

 

[godnotgod]

Nobody commented on the Royal Flush hand. It is said that extraodinary things happen because certain aspects of the natural world come together just right and cause something new. The odds of a royal flush hand in poker are very high. What are the odds of that in the same 48 hours or so someone related found a card with a question on it what is the highest hand in poker possible? Aren't the odds of that happening astronomical? There was no force causing it except chance. How did it happen? Please explain it and then I think we should be humbled by your greatness.

It's due to a principle called 'synchronicity', first presented by the great psychologist Carl Jung, in which there is an unmistakable, conscious, and synchronous interaction between the inside and the outside world:

"Synchronicity was one of Jung’s most profound yet least understood discoveries, in part because it cannot be appreciated until we personally step into and experience the synchronistic realm for ourselves. Jung’s discovery of synchronicity was in a sense the parallel in the realm of psychology to Einstein’s discovery of the law of relativity in physics. Because it is so radically discontinuous with our conventional notions of the nature of reality, the experience of synchronicity is so literally mind-blowing that Jung contemplated this phenomenon for over twenty years before he published his thinking about it. Jung’s synchronistic universe was a new world view which embraced linear causality while simultaneously transcending it. A synchronistic universe balances and complements the mechanistic world of linear causality with a realm that is outside of space, time and causality. In a synchronicity, two heterogeneous world-systems, the causal and acausal, interlock and interpenetrate each other for a moment in time, which is both an expression of while creating in the field an aspect of our wholeness to manifest. The synchronistic universe is beginning-less in that we are participating in its creation right now, which is why Jung calls it “an act of creation in time.”

CATCHING THE BUG OF SYNCHRONICITY

From a purely spiritual viewpoint, we have the spontaneity of the moment:

'Leave your soul slightly ajar in anticipation of the ecstatic moment'
from Sufism

...and from Zen:

'pondfrog, leapsplash'

..as it relates to the Zen experience of Satori.

synchronicity: it's happening all the time, but most of us are not tuned in, but focused instead on what the conditioned mind is dictating, which is the old hum drum paradigm that says we, of course, are intelligent beings living in a dead universe. Now what person in their right mind could possibly believe such rubbish?

 

[godnotgod]

TV just added to the odds. While I am pondering what the hell is going on here on TV comes a commercial advertising The Gambler. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket?

Synchronicity happens to me every now and then. For me, the pattern is that uncommon events occur in groups of three. These, I have noticed, come after I have been thinking about the theme for awhile beforehand. It's as if the universe is listening to me, and then responding accordingly. But sometimes the relationship is not so obvious. That is why it is important to constantly be attentive, what the Buddhists call 'mindfulness'. Most of us are actually missing the moment, wrapped up in our thoughts as we are. Spiritual teachers want to awaken us from that kind of deadened world so we can hear what the universe is directing us toward, which is always ultimately Absolute Joy.

 

[godnotgod]

I understand godnotgod and I realize I am on ignore by the loon. Oh fun!

Our presence here may be an event in synchronicity.

Kurt Vonnegut called such events a karass, which is an unplanned gathering of two or more unrelated people in order to fulfill a particular function, the nature of which is not readily apparent.

 

[godnotgod]

Yes, that's the impression I have. Continually hinting at some knowledge which the rest of us don't have, then side-stepping when challenged to say what this knowledge actually is. I'm bored with it.

Your bored because the dead conceptual framework you want everything to neatly fit into so it all 'makes sense' to you is itself boring and counter-intellilgent. Even if someone actually could 'explain' the universe to you in rational terms, you wouldn't believe it anyway, because something else in your consciousness KNOWS that to be a farce.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Even if someone actually could 'explain' the universe to you in rational terms, you wouldn't believe it anyway, because something else in your consciousness KNOWS that to be a farce.

That's pretentious and patronising.

Anyway, could you please explain clearly and straightforwardly what you believe instead of the continual game playing. Do you in fact believe that the universe is intelligent, and if so why? Even better would be to hear about what you have actually experienced.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Do you seriously expect the universe to jump out and explain itself to you, one thing at a time?

I do expect you to explain your beliefs clearly and straightforwardly. There seems to be sort of new-age muddle going on at the moment, quoting bits from here and there but not making them into a coherent whole, suggesting that you haven't really understood.
For example you mentioned mindfulness in a recent post, but do you actually practice it?

 

[godnotgod]

SO... what did you wish to know then?

For example, "Does the universe need intelligence to order it?"
The real answer is, "We do not have enough information to say, one way or the other." We don't know yet and may never know.

Suppose, for just a moment, that the kind of intelligence that the universe operates with is on a different level than that of rational human intelligence, which can be summed up via Reason, Logic, and Analysis. As long as those methodologies are utilized as a means of ascertaining intelligence in the universe, they will utterly fail, because they are going about it in a completely incorrect manner. They cannot synch with an intelligence that is not based on Reason, Logic, or Analysis. IOW, the intelligence of the universe may be such that the entire point of its intelligence is delightful play. What evidence is there for this idea? Looking up into the night sky, what do we see? An infinite variety of stars and galaxies whose existence has no apparent rhyme or reason. In this sense, the universe makes no sense at all. Variety itself equates with play.

 

[godnotgod]

That's pretentious and patronising.

Anyway, could you please explain clearly and straightforwardly what you believe instead of the continual game playing. Do you in fact believe that the universe is intelligent, and if so why? Even better would be to hear about what you have actually experienced.

I'm experiencing, from moment to moment, the same universe YOU'RE experiencing. Not that I am having the same experience you are having. The universe is filled with variety.

I don't entertain any beliefs about whether the universe is intelligent or not. I SEE that it is intelligent, because I'M intelligent, and there is no separation between my consciousness and the universe. If you think there is such a separation, show me at what point that separation exists.

Why do you think I'm playing games with you?

 

[Rick O'Shez]

An infinite variety of stars and galaxies whose existence has no apparent rhyme or reason. In this sense, the universe makes no sense at all.

Right, but why should it make sense?

 

[godnotgod]

I do expect you to explain your beliefs clearly and straightforwardly. There seems to be sort of new-age muddle going on at the moment, quoting bits from here and there but not making them into a coherent whole, suggesting that you haven't really understood.
For example you mentioned mindfulness in a recent post, but do you actually practice it?

Yes, but it has nothing to do with what I believe, but with what I see.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

I SEE that it is intelligent, because I'M intelligent, and there is no separation between my consciousness and the universe.

So are you saying that your consciousness and the universe are the same thing?

 

[Rick O'Shez]

Yes.

In that case you would know that the focus of mindfulness is on immediate experience.

 

[godnotgod]

Right, but why should it make sense?

It should in the sense that science expects that someday it will. It only makes sense in that it is nothing but divine playfulness, a playfulness that is of the highest order of intelligence, unfathomable by the ordinary, rational mind seeking an 'explanation', when there is no explanation. IOW, there is nothing to figure out.

 

[godnotgod]

So are you saying that your consciousness and the universe are the same thing?

Absolutely! Show me where my consciousness ends and the universe begins.

In the words of Vivekenanda:

'The universe IS the Absolute, as seen through the glass of Time, Space, and Causation'

Once you catch even a glimpse as to the implications of this statement, you will never be the same again.

Why do you call yourself a Theravadist? Don't you realize that the experience of the Buddha was exactly the merging of consciousness with the universe?

 

[godnotgod]

In that case you would know that the focus of mindfulness is on immediate experience.

Precisely. The problem with the scientific view is that what it comes up with is based on the dead past, which is memory, and then uses those facts to make predictions about the non-existent future. So science is not based on immediate experience, but the traces of immediate experience.