Doesn't this describe the universe? What are we? Isn't this therefore God being personal?
Maybe I was too vague in my way of defining "person". A simpler way might be to say a person (in my view) is an extension of a human being. A human has personality, a mask, a face, a behavior, that makes that person. Person to me requires to be human, limited, finite, etc.
If I would put the same attributes on the universe, I would diminish the universe. Also, it would be a form of categorical fallacy. Just because a whole consist of parts, the whole is not the same as the parts. We consist of cells, doesn't mean I'm a giant cell.
By whom? And are we actually, if you are just looking at humans, defined by space and time? What are we exactly? Do I have all the same cells in my body that I did when I was born, or even the same cells from a few years ago? If not, then a person must be defined by having a sort of repeating form. Doesn't the universe have repeating forms?
No. Person is not defined by the cells, but by the history, experience, memory, etc, that is expressing itself through interaction (see, I changed it to interaction
).
But I know what you mean. We interact with the universe as well through being. I just don't think of the universe is in itself a "person".
Doesn't this describe all sentient beings? And in a more rudimentary sense does this describe all of nature all the way from the subatomic to human mind? Nature is constantly making "decisions". It's how evolution works. It adapts itself to create stable forms.
Sure. I know exactly where you're going because I've been through those thoughts too. Ultimately, will or conscious decisions are based on natural processes, so why can't natural processes in other forms be conscious? I agree with such an idea. It is possible. But here, in these posts, we're not talking about what could be true, but what I currently believe to be true. Of course I could be wrong, but currently I don't see the universe as a whole as being a person, neither a nontemporal infinite being either since it to me, the way I defined those attributes, are contradicting each other.
Communicate? You mean interact? That too describes all of nature. If by communicate you mean share thoughts and ideas, then that certainly isn't something humans alone do. This happens within all the animal species, and even plant life. Communication occurs that tells others of those species of things occurring, such as an insect invasion where suddenly other trees who are not being attacked directly begin to secrete sap in advance of invasion. Or any countless other examples of the transmission of knowledge this way.
Believe me, I know. I consider every breath I take to be interaction with the world. And I even consider my mind and brain being an extension of the world and in need of existing within the world to be what it is. And as such, a person is that top of the mountain, or peak of the waves of reality. Reality is the ocean, carrying the potentiality, but a person is the peak that momentarily shows itself in that ocean.
You know what I believe? I believe Western science has adopted this view that nature is purely mechanical, dumb, blind, impersonal, etc. That has skewed our understanding of the aliveness of nature itself as a whole. We try to explain things to make them mechanical, not alive.
I know. And I don't. That's not my intent. I just define a person to be something that comes out from the world rather than something the world is. You probably define the word differently than me, and that's why we're have different views on that particular word. We're in agreement on most everything else.
But what is life? And then to the question, what is a "person"? Humans? I see all of it as personal, from the rock to the leaf, to the stars, to the air, to the planet, to your mind, to my body, to the universe within us, etc. It's all alive. And it all acts. It is bound together through forms. It interacts with itself as a body. We are not disjointed, disconnected, isolated, removed, separate, as persons from an impersonal universe or God. We are very much expressions of this living Reality.
Amen. No comment there.
So God, in a pantheistic view as being immanent in the universe would need to be personal.
Well, there's a difference of being personal and being a person. Our experience is personal, so yes, God is personal. But God being a person is to me to say that God is physical (only), not immanent, finite, limited, temporal. But God of a panentheistic view is beyond that in ways we yet haven't figured out. Beyond "person". Being human. Beyond being.
But I identify as panenthiestic, in that I additionally see the world of form, this body of God as it were, to be one of countless expressions of Infinity beyond it. And that Infinity is eternal and outside the body. So God is both wholly transcendent to, and wholly immanent in the universe. That God is both personal, and "impersonal" in the sense that it is the Uncreate, the Formless, the Source through which all form arises as the Personal. We are expressions of the Personal, as humans.
Yeah. Well, I'm not sure I follow that one, but maybe I will one day.
It's interesting we see ourselves alone as personal, like seeing the earth as the center of the universe, or humans as the pinnacle of God's creation. I see all these myths as expression of our existential disconnect with who we are in ourselves. It's no wonder why when we meditate, when we look into ourselves, we see we are not disconnected, that we are One. To know ourselves, is to know God. To know God is to know ourselves. And we are personal.
Absolutely. I agree with that. I think the only way I can see God as a person is to consider other people as representations of God. So when I talk to my son, I talk to God, and as such, he's a person at that moment. But just as there are male and female, races, mentalities, opinions and so on that form people's personality, I can't say God is specifically male or female just because a person is that. I see personhood more as an attribute of the living and can be a representation of the whole at a given moment, but is not a proper attribute when it comes to the whole at all times. Simply because it makes the whole lesser. It reduces the whole into a definition that will constrain it.
