Maybe no one talks about this because it doesn’t make any sense. And it sure sounds like a more intellectual way of saying “God in the gaps” to me :shrug".
Reminds me of the time I read Octavia Butler’s Parable series. The protagonist keeps insisting that “God is change.” WTF does that mean? “God is love”, I can grasp. “God is constant and ever-lasting”, I can also get, as well as “God is dynamic and ever-changing.” But God is change?" Why not just say “Change is the nature of the universe and our very existence.” Why label this with a loaded term like God?
Likewise, “God is the rules that drive our Reality”…this makes me go WTF. Why can’t we just say there are rules that drive our reality which we will never fully understand? What does calling these rules “God” serve, other than to give agnostics a profound thing to say when Aunt Mildred interogates them at the Thanksgiving dinner table?
I guess I see an unknowable God as functionally equivalent to agnosticism.
Well, it doesn’t set forth any moral framework. Adherents to such a view of God necessarily get their moral values from elsewhere in their lives (and may or may not try to force others toward those values).
“Tao” (or I guess “Dao”, now that Way-Giles isn’t used as much anymore), as used in the philosophical version of Daoism, is a pretty good term.
Spinoza used “god” because he’s a product of his culture and time - as are we. Our possibilities are somewhat greater, because we have more ready access to concepts from across the world.
Not exactly - Spinoza certainly did not think he was “agnostic”. He believed (or said he believed) in his version of ‘god’ with great tenacity.
Spinoza certainly thought his beliefs created a moral framework - at least, he wrote a lot on that subject.
Here’s a little summary of his philosophy, and how it applies to morality.
Really, the message is pretty consistent: if you see your human ego as nothing but an extension of the one true underlying reality, ego-centrism and hatred of “the other”, ego-centrism at the expense of one’s environment, all ought to fall away. Presumably, this perspective leads to a rational application of the Golden Rule: you do unto others as you would unto yourself, because others are yourself (or rather, you are both mere parts of a grand whole).
I take your point, but if one defines “God” as “what I believe in,” then sure, one believes in God.
Maybe I’m hung up on semantics, here, but I don’t see any of his moral philosophy as dependent on the existence of God. And I don’t see that the Golden Rule necessarily follows; one could just as easily justify harming one person as necessary to the greater good of the whole.
I may be a bit pigheaded here; as with Calvinist Christianity, I’ve never really understood how one fits the concept of morality into a deterministic system.
Way I see it is this: Spinoza lived in a time and place that was permeated with philosophizing about the nature of God, deriving from Judeo-Christianity (Spinoza was himself Jewish, of course), so it totally makes sense that, when he came to philosophize about the nature of reality and human place in it, he used the terminology and concepts “at hand”.
If he lived in ancient China he’d have without a doubt talked about “the Dao”; if in India, no doubt he’d have talked about Brahman and Atman.
None of these ideas are what I’d call “agnostic”. They all have plenty to say about the “divine” nature of things. What they tend to lack, at least in their philosophical forms, is any interest in a personalized deity or deities - although naturally both India and China had those, and plenty of them. They are simply different from the Judeo-Christian concepts - hence the uneasy fit of Spinoza and terms like “god”. No doubt in India lots of folks were puzzled about how “Brahman” can be, in one person’s talk, some sort of inherent principle of the universe, and in another, a creator-god who literally went around making stuff …
The point, I think, is that one is less likely to go around doing harm if one thinks of others as equal extensions of the divine unity - just like you are less likely to, say, stab something if you think it’s your own eyeball.
It’s deterministic in the large scale, but that doesn’t mean one cannot act more true to one’s true nature.
Put it this way: circumstances over which we have no control have determined that I own a computer, and have allowed me the education to have read Spinoza’s works; but I still have a choice whether to realize their truth or not. In Spinozian terms, if I do so, I won’t “win” anything (like going to heaven) - all that will happen is that I will understand my place within the universe - the epiphany is the reward: to act immorally is to cut oneself off from harmony with one’s nature.
Needless to say, this isn’t a path for everyone - far easier, at least from a social-control POV, to say “if you break these rules, you go to hell; follow them, you go to heaven”, to allow one’s culture to dictate morality, or to adopt some type of utilitarianism - but all those paths have dangers: they contain little that enables a person to judge the system from within, to determine the adequacy of the rules imposed either by religious authority, social custom, or utility. The universal view is supposed to help do that (at least in theory!).
Interesting. I appreciate the thinking about Spinoza in context and the concept of God.
In terms of Determinism and morals, I haven’t gotten the impression that Spinoza isn’t portraying humans as requiring guilt for their sin in some fashion, is he? With Calvinism, there seems to be an element of “Humans are frail…and should feel bad about it” that I haven’t seen in Spinoza’s writings…
There is very much a reason to believe it because it is both verifiable and is in consensus with other non-dual teachings. The gospels of Mark etc are mainly tales about his life, which is completely beside the point. It’s like the Theory of Relativity being replaced by a story about how amazing Einstein was like a person. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of allegories, injunctions and sayings that are of both practical and ontological use. And yes, there is definitely a connection between Plato and the Gnostics.
Quite the opposite. This is the God of no gaps.
That’s the God of the gaps, which is just a form of ignorance or lack of understanding.
This God that I am talking about is ”discovered” by ”science”. Meaning that the non-dual insight is a result of an honest and thorough investigation into the reality of existence. What you are talking about is basically just an upgraded ”Volcano God” which is the result of lower cognitive functions trying to explain the world. This is the big mistake of modernity, confusing the primitive volcano god (like the God of the Bible) with the non-dual understanding of the relationship between emptiness and existence. Science (as in higher levels of cognition) kills the volcano god (or rather, explains where the misunderstanding came from) and eventually discovers that emptiness is both awareness and the ground of the manifest universe.
It is not unknowable, it is simply unknown to most because in order to actually ”see” how the universe works, a human must reach a very high level of cognitive ability. Today most people hover around concrete operational and formal operational cognition (the latter being higher in the hierarchy) but in order to grasp the concept of non-duality fully one must develop the next level, which would be vision logic or network logic depending on which phrase you prefer.
I agree with you on a semantical level but I think there is a psychological point to re-claiming the word, I’ll explain…
Today most people believe in some sort of God, and they are trying to understand themselves and the universe through this understanding of God. The problem, as I see it, is that they have the wrong understanding of what God is. So essentially the problem is that they do not understand what God is, or rather, their God is too small. It’s a magic person, like a super powerful father figure, but on a cosmic scale that is like making a gnat into your God. The God of the bible can part water or destroy a city (you know… like volcanos do). But the non-dual God is the whole manifest Kosmos. Quite a difference of scale.
The problem is that if you try to take God away from a believer, he/she will not appreciate it. As many atheists have probably guessed by now, believers don’t take easily to people who say that their god doesn’t exist (just like atheists get very upset when religious people say that science is nonsense). By keeping the word God we avoid the conflict with those who are religious, and by redefining it we can also get the atheists to go along.
God a. A being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions.
b. The force, effect, or a manifestation or aspect of this being.
2. A being of supernatural powers or attributes, believed in and worshiped by a people, especially a male deity thought to control some part of nature or reality.
3. An image of a supernatural being; an idol.
4. One that is worshiped, idealized, or followed: Money was their god.
The part in italics is pretty close to the non-dual definition of God (or Brahman/Atman) and I basically suggest we use that.
Another point that I think needs to be made is the one about personhood. The reason God doesn’t have personhood is because personhood is a limitation. It’s also a completely made up thing (it is a concept, not a physical reality), it is something the human mind imprints on part of their reality (usually themselves and other people). Up until quite recently it was only awarded to a very small group of people in the West, (adult, white, non-enslaved males). Now some of us think we should extend it outside the human realm (to primates and whales), but it is a limitation. The reason God does not have a persona is because he/she/it is everything, so there is no need. God is already all the personas and all the physical manifestations. I’m one of Gods personas, so are you.
What we are usually attacking here is the “magical” personas that result from very low cognitive functions (pre-operational) where we believe that everything has intention and vitality, and we take everything personally. This is usually where aboriginal people who are part of isolated tribes are at. They think every tree and every rock has a persona, as well as having a belief in ghosts or spirits (which are disembodied personas). There might be some sort of truth to it (I’m not ruling out the possibility of a bardo, afterlife or multiple dimensions) but if there is, it’s still part of the Kosmos, and as such can be mapped and understood. No need for a God of the gaps or myths, we can simply investigate with our mind and our senses and see if it is true. But in order to find the truth, you first must let go of the idea that you already have it.
I agree that the Spinozian concept of “god” is most definitely not a “god of the gaps”. It does not attempt to explain why rain falls (or posit some being making rain fall); rather, it’s “about” how one sees oneself in relation to such things as rain … additional scientific discoveries would, presumably, only strengthen the Spinozian worldview, not weaken it (particularly in such matters as how ecosystems are structured - very Spinozian, that). If they did weaken it, presumably a Spinozian would … modify the worldview. Investing one’s ego in a theory is very human, but contrary to the Spinozian project (again, at least in theory! Humans remain humans, and it is hard to hold a Spinozian worldview - as Spinoza himself stated).
I think the reason people like stuff like the Gospel of Thomas has nothing whatsoever to do with its presumed historical relationship to a person named Jesus who may, or may not, have lived and taught in 1st century Judea, but rather that it has the ‘right flavour’ if you will - that it fits in with other philosophers and writers.
People who are “into” Spinoza tend to take what Huxley called a “perennial philosophy” worldview - namely that there is nothing unique in Spinoza (except, perhaps, in his phrasing), that other philosophers throughout history have tapped into similar notions - the same “flavor” can be found in some forms of Daoism (the philosophical kind, as found in Chuang Tzu, not the more religious variety with gods & hells etc.), some forms of Buddhism (ditto), sometimes in Sufi’ism, the more mystic varieties of Christianity and Judaism, etc. Once you see it, you can recognize it elsewhere.
The problem is, as always, that these concepts are easy (for some! Under some conditions!) to “grasp” intuitively, very hard to explain without getting 'em tangled in very human matters - mostly, people’s own cultural and intellectual backgrounds, needs, and ego-driven desires. Indeed, that’s what is commented on above with Spinoza talking about “god” - he’s using the tools familiar to him and to his audience.
However, this difficulty leads each and every one of these philosophies or teachings to, eventually and historically, end up - much like any other religion, complete with the equivalent of churches, a clergy, gods, and rewards and punishments. Because that’s what humans tend to do.
That’s a reasonable expectation, or a reasonable lack of expectation if you prefer. It’s not an accurate one but it’s an entirely understandable one. It really is hard to grasp the concept of an impersonal God, a God that is not an entity-personality kind of dude but rather more of an abstraction representing the entirety of That Which Is, being something you can pray to and thereby communicate with.
That, on the other hand, I agree with hands down. No Santa Claus God here. No Magic Genie God doing wish-grantings. At best you might get a clear vision of how you, the person praying, might intercede on your own behalf, thanks to new comprehensions and clarity and wisdom and all that.
I’d dissent with you on that one. You’ve got a lot of unquestioned assumptions embedded in a short phrase: “heaven”, “you”, and “die”. As with God, those, too, unpack best as abstractions for many people. Of most central importance is the middle one, “you”. It only seems self-explanatory if you’ve never thought much about it, or the thoughts you did have about it didn’t get far from the myth of detached individual self-contained selves with (therefore) finite individua lifespans.
Well, yeah. Neither atheists nor theistic people are fond of this depiction and insist it “doesn’t count” as religion or God or whatever.
Love thy neighbor as yourself. Because it IS yourself. You are not just the limited whole/part (holon) of your body/mind system, you are completely interdependent and interconnected but vertically and horizontally. Not just on an ethical or philosophical level, but also on a material level. You are an integrated part of a larger whole, and you in turn are made up of parts who integrate into the wholeness that you perceive to be you (the ego). And once this realization becomes experiential, your relationship to yourself and the rest of the Kosmos changes character completely. For the better, needless to say.
It seems like all (or almost all) of the world religions are actually founded on non-dual insights from people who have developed an extremely high (perhaps ultimate) state of cognition and awareness, because even if the most literal minded of mythologies (like the Jewish one) you can still find references that are clearly non-dual. For example in the bible when Moses asks god for his name God replies ”I AM THAT I AM”. God is the ground of being and awareness itself. Then it turns dualistic and literal, and the whole thing becomes yet another volcano god who punishes and rewards people, but there are still gems of truth hidden in there.
Lately I’ve come to think of ”free will” as a phase in our cognitive development. It’s essentially a form of ignorance that will stick with you until you’re completely liberated from the sense of a separate self (ego dissolution). This seems to be confirmed by non-dual teachers who refer to ”choiceness awareness”, which can psychological be described as a complete identification with pure awareness itself, rather than the objects (like the ego) that are appearing in the awareness. Or as Christian mystics would put it: Union with the divine. God has no ”free will” because what would it be free from? Free will can only exist lower in the Kosmic hierarchy and is in essence just a rationalization of agency.
It’s almost as if the knowledge has rained down on us from above, but as it meanders down through our cognitive systems it becomes more and more misunderstood. It goes from being trans-rational to being rational to being pre-rational. But at the same time the lower level cognitive functions seem prepared for the information, and and sending a search query up through the structure: ”Who/what am I? What is the nature of this existence?”. And once all the confusion and cognitive dissonance is dealt with, what is called enlightenment occurs. It’s an incredible system, both the human mind and the universe, and it is amazing that us humans have a capacity to understand how it all fits together.
Ps. Another thing that people keeps missing is that this is a verifiable theory. If you follow the injunctions you can see, grasp and experience how it all works. Becoming “one with God” is a very real thing, not a concept or an idea, and has just been translated into different concepts and traditions, like “awakening” or “enlightenment”.
Pretty well. At least, I feel this to be true. Though the mechanism which led me to that is difficult to explain, and I don’t feel it all the time. Most of the time I’m just, as it were, remembering what I thought and felt once upon a time.
For me at least, the rest has been trying to rationalize it out - often by reading guys like Spinoza, to try to understand it. I sometimes think I live my life mostly at a very animal level - full of misplaced ego, competing and cooperating in turn with the other animals, in fear and doubt. For me, the true life is lived in very short moments over years (now, decades) when the realizations hit and one becomes One, for no reason I know. Even though it hasn’t happened now for many years, I still remember it, and probably will 'till I die; I do think it has changed me for the better, but even if it hasn’t, it wouldn’t really matter.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if this were true. Also, it would not surprise me in the slightest if “non-dual” thinking and the “volcano god” type thinking both had their place in human social evolution. That’s just the sort of trick the universe is good at.
I’m not there yet. I have seen this sort of thing only in brief moments over decades. I just have the memory of it. I can see how easy it would be to twist this into an ego thing, how often that must happen, how difficult it is to resist. I’m convinced that (plus the impossibility of ‘educating’ people into this sort of thing through talk) is why most people who are into this sort of thing don’t talk about it, much.
I recently read an interesting account of how beavers, the buck-toothed rodents, effectively create their own ecosystems with their instinct-driven dam building. The account closed on a note of wonder at how these creatures have had a cumulative impact on their environment “… second only to humans …” without having a thought in their heads as to the actual impact of their individual little actions.
I admit, that did cause me to chuckle at bit. I thought to myself how very like those beavers we humans are. Only our powers are so much greater, our potential for harm so much greater - exactly because our capacity for self-awareness is so much greater.
Most of the time, like the beavers (I’m assuming here, because I don’t speak Beaver ), we have no real idea, and care less, about the meaning and impact of our individual little actions … but every once in a while, some of us are given a glimpse: that it is all working towards something: the universe effectively knowing itself - and seeing itself as good - the ultimate wonder.
Science is, of course, a big part of that, as is art; as is the study of philosophy. Perhaps part of it is seeing what those beavers’ labours amounts to.
Perhaps today, but if you read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason, he specifically says that he believes in a deistic god because he can see no other cause for the design of the Solar System. He very clearly says that he is not an atheist - though since the gaps have vanished today, I suspect he would be.
I don’t recall any of our Doper Deists claiming that God spoke to them. I can see write-only praying, but that seems rather pointless because of the expected lack of response. God as spirit is not a personal god. That’s a more fundamental difference than the type of god it is.
The big argument for the deistic god is not that it will listen but that it created the universe for a purpose and that gives meaning which lots of people need. I don’t, but I recognize that many do. The meaning may be unfathomable, and few of them claim to know what it is, just that it exists.
I don’t think detached selves are a myth - not totally detached, of course, since we are influenced by our environment from before we are born. But we learn of an afterlife in traditional religions through God or gods talking about it to someone, since even they don’t claim evidence of it. What does Spinoza’s God say about an afterlife? Absolutely nothing, of course. Any thoughts about it are really not a part of this kind of belief system, but represent a different one.
For many atheist means that I don’t believe in your god. Teddy Roosevelt called Paine an atheist (a dirty atheist IIRC) for example.
I empathize with that, experiences come and go, but insights are very valuable. For me it’s been both a journey of understanding logically and experiencing directly. In a way it is a bit strange that it is possible to know it without experiencing it, but I suspect it is part of the process. For myself I feel it more and more every day, as I remove more and more of the different blocks in the system. I’ve found a way to work with and interact with the different cognitive levels in the body/mind system that speeds up the process, and that is basically all I do. But most of my time the experience is one of the witness, observing the mechanisms of the mind and body, but not engaging or associating with them. It speeds up the process. Kind of like how people work better if the manager is NOT hunched over their desk trying to push their keys for them.
But it is interesting to ask oneself ”Who/what is it that feels separate?” or ”What is it trying to defend itself against?”. What the buddhists and yogis call shadow work is essential, it is basically removing bugs and cognitive dissonance from the system, allowing it to operate better. The more fear and ignorance that is removed, the better the experience gets. I told a friend yesterday that I get more pleasure from drinking a glass of water now than I did from having sex 5 or 10 years ago. As the system opens up physically, emotionally and mentally it gets much more sensitive and the experience of bliss, pleasure etc becomes stronger and stronger. But there are also waves of the opposite as you go through this. Sometimes very intense, that is my experience.
My realization is that ultimately, mind is emptiness. Well… everything is. To me the world looks like this:
First Emptiness
Then Matter
Then Life
Then Mind
Then Soul
Then Spirit
Then Emptiness
As you can see, emptiness is both the Alpha and the Omega, and as it turns out, it is also the ink the rest of the letters are written out with, and the paper that the alphabet is written on. The qualities of Emptiness seem to be infinite creativity and wisdom. It supplies the structure (rules) of the universe as well as the spark of energy that evolves into matter. The holons of matter work within a structure (like gravity) that eventually leads to the evolution of life, which evolves into mind, which evolves into soul… and then we soon back where we started, with emptiness.
This seems to be verified by facts as well, since science today claims that the universe emerged from emptiness (Big Bang or Big Oops! or perhaps Big SURPRISE!). ”Outside” the universe is emptiness and if we look inward to the atoms and sub-atomic particles, they seem to dissolve into some sort of relativistic foam of probability. So another way to put it is that the manifest universe is information, interaction is a form of communication, and it all takes place in (and is in essence created by and powered by) emptiness. That leaves no gaps. The way up is the way down, all is one parading as many, consciousness is looking for itself, etc etc.
Haha! Yeah I know that. These insights and experiences can just was well turn you into a narcissistic egomaniac as a saint. I’m sure there are several cult leaders who have had true insights into the nature of reality, but who then translated it into ”I am special, people must do as I tell them”, kind of missing the fact that this universe is incredibly democratic. Everyone is ”it”, the personas are essentially just roles being played out, and in the end it’s the same actor hiding behind all the masks.
Actually I think it is a valid perspective to say that all of humanity is stuck in a collection of mass hallucinations called ”cultures” and are almost completely unaware of what they are, how the universe works, and what their impact is on it. But at the same time (almost) everyone comes with the potential for seeing and knowing this, which leads to a great sense of relaxation not to mention other health and intellectual benefits. My very strong suspicion is that we’re heading for another leap in collective awareness as this information is now spreading very rapidly. There are several communities dedicated to non-dual understanding, psycho-spiritual development and awakening. The fact that such a large part of the world has established itself as modern or post-modern (meaning rational and higher) means that the floor is raised, many more people now have access to correct information (even though the noise to signal ratio is still not great) and many people have been able to completely throw off the yoke of pre-modern religion and authoritative conformist cultures.
I would invite you to take a look at the All Quadrants All Levels map. It has the different stages of individual/collective development stages mapped out very clearly. Knowing it will usually help progress as well as shape a more comprehensive understanding of how the levels lead to each other and fit together. In this system there is also no ”wrong”, ”evil” or ”bad” level, they are all fundamental, you can’t get to the top floor unless you’ve first built the lower floors, and the important realization is that although everyone thinks that their current floor IS the ”top floor”, there is always a new and higher perspective available.
Heh, I don’t so often talk about this stuff anymore - it rarely does anyone any good, least of all me. I inevitably end up feeling like I am “witnessing” when I know that to be a fairly worthless endeavor and likely to make me look like some sort of crank. Intellectually it is interesting, though.
Which may go some way towards answering the question in the title. Why don’t you hear more about the Spinozian model? Because those who get into that model are less likely, that those following other models, to talk about it. Why? Because the model is attractive based on direct, intuitive experience. I don’t think one can be talked into seeing it, much less convinced of it by proselytizing. At least in my experience it works the other way - first comes the experience, then comes the thinking about it, then comes the talk - and the last step is only useful to those who have had the first; it tends to distort more than it clarifies.
I know there are a variety of techniques people use to gain these insights, and I have heard that they work, and have no reason to disbelieve it - only they never worked for me.
The chart reminds me somewhat of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, combined with social evolution.
I doubt it worked so neatly - though I do believe that human philosophy and conciousness is evolving, I do not think that it tracks so easily onto historical stages, or that quickly (people from ancient feudal China were, I think, not so very different from us - at least, those who recorded their thoughts in writing: the reason is that, in the scale of human evolution, ancient feudal China was actually quite recent - all of recorded history is).
For myself, I’m not sure how useful laying out such road-maps are, practically. My concern is that they could act as a magnet for the ego - “I’m now a Teal Strategist, while you, dear Orange Achiever, have much to learn” - the sort of thing that contains the possibility of rituals, churches, a congregation (perhaps this “'global integral community” that is mentioned on the chart), a priesthood, etc. … because that’s what humans do to get stuff done.
They are simply different from the Judeo-Christian concepts - hence the uneasy fit of Spinoza and terms like “god”. No doubt in India lots of folks were puzzled about how “Brahman” can be, in one person’s talk, some sort of inherent principle of the universe, and in another, a creator-god who literally went around making stuff …
), we have no real idea, and care less, about the meaning and impact of our individual little actions … but every once in a while, some of us are given a glimpse: that it is all working towards something: the universe effectively knowing itself - and seeing itself as good - the ultimate wonder.