How will one in universe know?
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Panentheism: What is more than the universe?
- Thread starter The Sum of Awe
- Start date
How will one in universe know?
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
Look into Spinoza and his pan(en)theistic views.
Wasn't he a pantheist rather than a pan-entheist?
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
It's not clear. Martial Guéroult suggested that Spinoza was a panentheist rather than a pantheist.
Also, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoza#Panentheist.2C_pantheist.2C_or_atheist.3F
Basically, there's more to the Totality of Things than just the visible, measurable, physical Universe.
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To put you to ease, the difference between pantheist and panentheist doesn't matter much to me. Essentially, I'm a Naturalistic Pantheist, but since I know that many consider "pan" in "pantheist" to only mean our current universe and disregard any multiverse or outside forces, I choose to add the -en- for emphasis.
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I've heard that phrase, or similar before, and always took it to support interdependence rather than separating each individual, not literally to be over the amount of whole.
I'm not sure if something literally, objectively can be greater than its whole.
Not sure what you mean by the barrel being 110% of its product.
I still feel like something's missing, but not sure what...
A group of ants get busy and a mound of dirt starts to build. It grows and grows, and over years hardens. Eventually, as their numbers grow, it becomes a hill. Over time, bits fall off.
One day, a man walks by and looks at it, and thinks, "Whoa. Elephant. Cool," and walks on.
Elephant Rock | Valley Of Fire
More than the literal.
Spinoza himself wrote "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature ... they are quite mistaken". It seems Spinoza considered God to be what theoretical physicists would call multi-dimensional. That is, attributes and dimensions not visible to us, Nature being only one of many (maybe innumerable) attributes of God. I'll take Spinoza = Panentheist for $500, Alex.
It could mean many things.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Most Jews who drift in this direction tend not to speculate on the issue as to whether we should picture "God" in a pantheistic or panentheistic manner. An absolutely excellent book that covers this is "Judaism, Physics, and God: Searching for Sacred Metaphors in a Post-Einstein World" by Rabbi David Nelson.
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
Beer.
That's what's missing. A nice cold beer.
Probably, but I'd rather wait until I'm done driving for the day
It helps to think outside of purely materialistic terms. Consider an idea. Ideas do not take up space or occupy space. "Fictional" realities are the same way, and some of us consider such "fictions" to be an aspect of reality called otherworlds, parallel dimensions, what have you.
I'll grant this might be getting a little too zany for some people's reality boxes.
But area is a materialistic term. Ideas do not exist *there*, they exist but exist in no place.
Abstracts exist with no regard for space (dimension) or matter (physicality).
Then you've answered your own questions about how "totality" includes more than matter and location.
But they do not exist in an area, and so they do not exist outside of the universe.
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
"Outside" in this context is not a spatial reference since it's not a spatial object.
Inside, outside, over, under, above, within, around, encompassing, emerged, submerged, and immersed ... all of it at the same time.
Put it this way.
The 3 dimensions.
Start with left and right (the x-axis, let's say). Which way is up and down? Is it left or right? Where is up and down on the x-axis? The y-axis (in this case up and down) is its own dimension and direction. It's neither left nor right.
A fifth, sixth, seventh dimension will not be to the right, 3 degrees up, and outside of a box with a cherry on top. It has to be something new, different, other than the other things.
Would you be able to say that it transcends it, though?
That's what I think is the key distinction between panentheism and pantheism: the one recognizes some sort of force/aspect/thing that transcends the space/time limitations of a universe.
No location, right. Neither ""inside"" nor ""outside,"" as meaningful as those terms can be.
Edit: The universe is not delimited by a boundary of dimension--rather, dimension is part of what constitutes the universe (the totality).
When someone uses a phrase like "outside the universe," I understand it as a metaphoric image only indicating something more, greater, "above." If they insist on it literally, I will but roll my eyes.
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