Yes, intellectually it is interesting. And also yes, I kinda was wondering about your point above, woven into my question. Folks most inclined to feel it works in some way are probably less likely to discuss it or proselytize about it.
Seems to me whining about how dualism is all wrong is engaging in a form of dualism. For dualism to be wrong there’d have to be not-dualism which is right. Which would be a dualistic way of thinking about dualism.
Anyway, it seems to me that there’s not much point in all this. When before you study Zen the mountains are mountains and the clouds are clouds. When you study Zen the mountains are not mountains and the clouds are not clouds. When you master Zen the mountains are mountains and the clouds are clouds.
The meaning of the universe is that the universe is a bunch of stuff that happened. There is no meaning. Does this mean we should despair? No, of course not. If the universe is meaningless, then the meaninglessness of the universe is meaningless. If it doesn’t matter, why should it matter that it doesn’t matter?
So live your life, or don’t. Try to be happy or don’t. Avoid pain or don’t. I know what sort of society and life I’d rather live, and that’s because I’m an animal that evolved to want that sort of thing. If I were different I’d want different things.
Verifiable? You have a cite that the Gospel of Thomas can be proven to be the actual words of Jesus?
Have ever actually read Spinoza? Not exactly stuff that grabs the reader and draws one in … and I say that as a huge fan who does self-identify (admittedly with some major liberties being taken) as a Spinozan pantheist. Others in this thread ascribe his use of the word “God” as a result of his being a product of his time, but more so the entire approach is: he was born in the intellectual era that was soon to produce Newton as well and the two travelled in similar circles; he wrote philosophy as geometric proof of the time as the package that appealed to his target audience. Not exactly in the style of today’s New Age atheists.
Still the basic premise appeals to those like me, even if I do not quite buy the whole substance, attributes, thought, extension, and modes bits, or his take on parallelism.
People like me who, on one hand, feel, or at least need to believe, that there are some moral absolutes, things that are right and wrong in a universal sense, that Hitler would have still been “evil” even he managed to kill everyone who thought differently and had everyone left agreeing with him. And for whom that implies something that must be called “God.”
But who do not believe in any God-that-gives-a-fuck, or that exists as a creator or a destroyer, or is supernatural acting outside of the rules of the universe, or one that is possible for us to really comprehend or fully perceive, or who hears or needs praise, or that is transcendent … but if not apart from the material universe then the material universe is of God … the immanence of God. To that way of thinking (and this I think was the appeal of Spinoza’s God to Einstein) the more we understand of the universe and how it actually works the more we appreciate and understand parts of God. To some degree trying to study aspects of how the universe actually is, be they grand cosmic understandings or small bits of narrow study, is the most true worship of God that is possible.
Spinoza felt that the observable universe is merely a subset of the attributes of God and that much of God are attributes that are unknowable by us. While it is not exactly what he meant, it is a bit funny that the universe has indeed worked out to be like that, with most of what we now know “is” being dark matter and dark energy, observable and knowable only by its impacts on that which can experience, and quite a few believing that the universe that actually exists exists in more spatial dimensions than the three that we can perceive, even be they curled up small.
It was true then and to many is true now that a “God” must mean a God-that-gives-a-fuck and must imply a transcendent God … and by that standard Spinoza argues against the concept of God. From a practical perspective I, like most atheists, actively disbelieve in a supernatural god who creates and destroys or who is aware of humanity or would (if such awareness existed) care any more than I care about a group of ten or sore neurons in my associative cortex. So to “believers” I am an atheist. But my invoking God as being requisite at all in any form makes me a silly believer to hard atheists.
So writing and concepts that are dense to the point of near incomprehensibility to today’s readers and a perspective that is found hard to accept by both those with belief and those with active disbelief. Big surprise it is not the hot meme of the day.
Well egotistical people will of course try to use it to claim that they are higher level than others, but people who actually are higher level see it as a beautiful instrument and map. But yes, it definitely causes some trouble in the integral community. Personally I have no trouble with it at all and think everyone would be greatly helped by mapping themselves and then just being transparent about what result they get, because it improves communication so much. If someone says ”I’m at Orange now” I know that I can talk to them about certain things, but that other things will not compute for them. It also means I can empathize with their (main) perspective and present information in a way that is adapted to them. Otherwise you may end up trying to explain quantum physics to a toddler, which is not a negative statement about the toddler, it just means communication is doomed to fail.
As far as I can tell, the map is correct, which is the main thing I am looking for when I am shopping for maps. I checked out the Kohlberg’s map too and it seems alright, but very partial.
This argument does not make sense. Can you extrapolate, please?
You have not understood what Zen is trying to say. Which is to be expected, because Zen is notoriously and intentionally confusing. They are basically using confusion and paradox to snap people out of the rationalist trap. Only by access to trans-rational levels of thinking can the Zen riddles be solved.
This is ”gross reductionism” where everything is seen as atoms. It’s been outdated for more then a century. Explain what a ”thought” or ”idea” is in this world view? What atom in my brain contains the idea and sensation of the word ”blue”? Where does it appear? Who is experiencing it? None of that (among many other things) can not be explained if you take this world view, which is why it has been discarded. Nobody, including you, actually believes it, because everybody can intuitively sense the mind/body split. Saying ”there is no mind” or ”the mind and the body is the same” is simply experienced as not true.
What is it that wants this and thinks this?
The author is irrelevant (to me), I’m only interested in the content. I am saying that the content (what is pointed towards in the allegories) can be verified by following certain injunctions (such as meditation, self-inquiry, or big amounts of psychedelic drugs). Whether there ever was a guy from Nazareth named Jesus said it is not really relevant unless you are religious, I’m not religious so I don’t really care, and I think the debate about “literal truths” always miss the point. When Jesus says ”The kingdom is within you…” I don’t think he meant that if you cut yourself open with a knife you will find a nation ruled by a monarch in your bladder. 
And Buddhas statements can be verified as well. As can Platos and the others. I assume the main reason that not everybody is non-dual already is that people are too damn lazy to do the work, expecting someone else to explain everything to them and then complaining when the explanation either doesn’t fit their current world view, or contradicts their current perspective on experience.
Today I think people don’t discuss it because they will be unfriended by both the atheists and the religious people. The atheists will think you’re religious and the religious people will think you’re crazy, deluded, a satanist, some sort of weird hippie or an atheist (if you use words like Kosmos, Awareness and Consciousness rather than God or Godhead). It’s a very messed up situation…
The problem seems to be that the two groups focus on the “negative” aspect rather than the positive. Atheist people get pissed off that there is a God, religious people get pissed off that it’s not “their” God. The way I see it it’s actually good news for both. Religious people get a God and atheists get a rational universe that can be explained by science (and will be, eventually).
That’d be a no, then.
See, if the Gospel of Thomas, or Plotinus, or the Letter to Flora, speak to you and resonate with you, that’s fine and dandy. Authorship is not as significant as the content, I get that.
But when you make a claim of fact, you have to back that up. Saying you think that Thomas is the actual words of Jesus is fine. But saying that can be verified, well…that using language from what you call the “formal operational” level. “Verifiable” means “can be demonstrated by objective evidence, even to asshole unenlightened skeptics like Slow Moving Vehicle”.
So. You think the Gospel of Thomas is the actual teaching of Jesus. Fine. That’s just a opinion, though.
It is verifiable by any definition.
If you do X you get Y. I did X and I got Y. Others who do X get Y. When we compare our X’s and Y’s they appear to be the same.
All non-dual teachings clearly say that the ultimate truth of existence can not be translated into spoken language, i.e. represented by symbols pointing at other symbols. Maybe in the future when new languages have evolved it will be possible, but if it was possible now I don’t think we would have this discussion. If I were to try to explain to you how the whole thing works I would have to write several books. Fortunately others have before me, so I can just recommend a few of those if you are interested:
”Sex, Ecology, Spirituality” - Ken Wilber
”I am that” - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
”Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha” - Daniel Ingram
They all cover it in different ways. The first one is for the intellectuals who need to understand how everything works ”rationally”. The second is an interview book with a self-realized sage, the third one is full of injunctions and descriptions, basically describing how to get to the understanding through different forms of meditation. If you don’t eat your meat, you don’t get any pudding. Then of course you can complain and say there is no pudding, and that is fine, more pudding for the rest of us
No, I very specifically pointed out that the author can not be confirmed, only the content. My ”opinion” on the matter is that I don’t care who wrote it, but it’s good at describing how this process works.
[Bolding mine]
I have read enough Spinoza to be dangerous. I have supplemented that with reading some writings about it - Oxford’s A Very Brief Introduction, etc. There are many philosophers who are dense, but who are invoked more regularly.
What you have above, which I bolded, is at the heart of my motive for the OP. His approach appears to support an ever-more-refined scientific approach, and, as you say, holds it as “true worship.” So - yay Science!
His model also allows for the unknowable (e.g., at this point: dark matter - but there will always be something). Again, cool: he says that Humans should not arrogantly believe they can know everything. The official jargon I believe is epistemic arrogance - and it is an essential piece of many belief systems. He calls that unknowable “an aspect of God” but as we have discussed, this is not the same God as used in other systems. So - yay for avoiding Human arrogance!
I can see where his model is inconsistent with believers in a Personal Active God. I can see where his model is inconsistent with pure Materialist Atheists who assert that everything can be explained by Humans, so there is no Epistemic Arrogance - everything will be explainable eventually.
But that middle ground between Personal God Religions, and Materialist Atheism seems pretty darn big, and Spinoza’s model fits in that middle ground pretty nicely.
Heh, very true. As one of those others who mentioned the notion that his use of “god” was a product of his time, I’ll just say that while I agree with much of the basic premise of Spinoza, I often can’t follow his philosophical flights of logic … even in translation with notes.
Very much so. Learning is worship, and worship is the appropriate mental attitude to have.
To my mind, worship of some object or personality is misdirected, a sort of mistake - akin to the Judeo-Christian notion of ‘idolatry’. The problem in that tradition was mistaking an object (a carving of word or stone) for the reality (a God who is not pegged in any one place). Similarly, worship of a God - as an object separate from creation, with a personality - is a dimunition of the reality.
Heh true enough. I suspect more these days came to Spinoza from other sources, than became convinced by Spinozian writings. It is hard to determine how popular the worldview is, because it is usually held pretty privately.
The “point” of a non-dualistic perspective isn’t to be right or wrong, as in winning an argument. The “point” is changing your perspective, in seeing things as they are - and that they are good. That, in spite of - maybe even because - we are basically animals that are born, struggle to survive, and die. 
All good stuff. “Very much so. Learning is worship, and worship is the appropriate mental attitude to have.” - that is a key point: When I describe Atheists, as I currently understand the position, I don’t see room for “worship.” An awe and regard for the incomprehensible beauty and scale of our Relativistic Universe and Reality, but not worship.
I think that is why I am seeking to understand where Spinoza fits on the “spectrum.” His “option” - embracing Science and also calling for worship as part of “engaging” the Unknowable parts of “God” - seems like it occupies its own spot.
I continue to appreciate this discussion.
Wordman, while I am with Malthus in having found understanding Spinoza’a writing more work to comprehend than many other dense philosophers, I think you still are mostly correct.
Perhaps the answer to why Spinoza is not invoked more regularly is a selection bias of sorts then? Which of course Voyager already alluded to.
a) Middle grounds are less often the positions that people argue from in these sorts of, oh heck, any sort of, debates. Those interested in entering them are usually looking for ammunition that supports their (usually polar) extant conclusions, be it hard atheism or belief in a personal (and usually transcendent and most commonly Christian) god or gods. A philosophy that supports that middle ground but is not aligned with either side? Where’s the use of that to those combatants? 
b) Those of us who do find at least elements of Spinoza pantheism as appealing to and supportive of the perspectives that we already are predisposed to, are not so excited about going back and forth over and again with those who are of either pole. Decartes and ghost in the machine arguments? Is free will an illusion, a necessary illusion, an emergent phenomenon/property (like fluid properties are to H20 molecules so is consciousness to information processing … emergent of the patterns of interaction but still of the stuff)? … meh. Sometimes fun but the discussions bog down pretty quickly. Those of us who are not so bright don’t have enough intellectual capital to spare to play there long and have enough to still engage in other more productive venues, and the Einsteins … had/have bigger other fish to fry than those debates.
As to Spinoza and morality/guilt … he may have been excommunicated by the Rabbis but he was still very Jewish. Jokes about Jewish mothers and guilt up close and personal aside, guilt is not so much an institutional thing in Jewish religious thinking and philosophy. He came from a background that emphasized following the rules not primarily (if at all) because your eternal soul’s future depended on it, or because God would reward or punish you for your rule-following during this life either, but simply because they are the rules, right to do because they are right to do. Thus the take on morality that Malthus references emerges naturally as an outgrowth, in contrast to the thinking of others reared in the Calvinist Dutch society that he was embedded within.
ETA: I see more overlap between “awe and regard for the incomprehensible beauty” and “worship” than do you I think.
All good. I see the overlap with worship. All part of the spectrum. And yes, perhaps it is just a matter of not seeing value in engaging more polarizing positions.
It feels like Spinoza, Montaigne, Voltaire…I dunno - something’s overlapping there…
I have no doubt that it is within our grasp to know these things (identify the physical origins of the things we experience as specific thoughts). Do you assume that we cannot know it?
And, not “everybody” intuitively senses the mind/body split. You’re projecting your experiences of your own senses onto other people.
But not everybody who does X gets Y. So is it verifiable, or is it just a matter of certain specific biological configurations having similar interpretations that happen to match up with some interpretations that another person with similar biological configuration happened to write down at some point?
Moreover, what if everybody did? Everybody is subject to a host of perceptual illusions that are hardwired into us, and it does not mean that what we perceive that does not really exist is actually there. Our senses and our perceptions lie.
We are wired to perceive that which does not exist, these “lies”, because that wiring has, over evolutionary history, been associated with greater “fitness.”
In truth you can point to specific neurons that if stimulated cause particular sensations and thoughts by the way. What atom? More which ensembles of cells in what pattern of activity. Who is experiencing it? The information processing entity as a result of the complex self-referential pattern of interactions.
Quite the opposite. We already do know it. The knowledge is already available. Of course right now it seems as only a very small group of people know it, but that group seems to be growing rather quickly now. But then again, how many people ”know” how relativity works? A hundred years ago it was Einstein and a few of his fellows, today it’s thousands of physicists who know it, and millions of people who at least have a basic grasp of it and knows that it is knowable. But it is nice to know that it is available for understanding by those who are so inclined. The same thing holds true for non-dual understanding of the Kosmos.
Unfortunately the knowing will not fit the current world view of a lot of people, so they will be unlikely to upgrade until they start deconstructing their current beliefs. For example you say ”Identify the physical origin…” which pre-assumes a certain relationship that may not be accurate. Basically you are assuming that thoughts somehow are a result of matter, and that consciousness can be explained as an emergence of matter. This is exactly what the materialist ”flatlanders” and the cartesian dualists have failed to explain or provide evidence for, and something that the non-dual perspective/insight/system explains. But you can’t force a non-dual perspective into a dualist or monist one. The non-dual transcends and includes the dual. The materialists aren’t necessarily wrong, they’re just partial, as are the idealists. Non-dualism is an end of that war.
Developmentally the body/mind split appears pretty early so I would say everyone who is an adult and not having a psychosis or a spiritual awakening is experiencing the body/mind split. Perhaps you have another definition of it, I’m using developmental psychology as my base of reference when I talk about this.
If you’re not experiencing a body/mind split you are either having a psychosis (unable to differentiate between yourself and the environment) or you are in a state of transcendence (feeling at one with the entire universe), or you’re a baby and have not yet learned that your body and the environment are different. Usually we start learning this when we instinctually start realizing the difference between biting the blanket and biting a finger (one is painful, the other isn’t).
It seems universal enough. Everyone who actually goes through the trouble of following the injunctions of non-dual teachings end up having the same experiences and same insights. This has been verified by thousands and thousands of people. It’s really not my problem if people are too lazy to verify it by themselves. I’ve solved the problem of duality, the mind/body split and cognitive dissonance for myself. I can help others solve it but I can’t clove it for them, because I can’t get into their mind and put the information there directly, neither can I forcibly upgrade their cognitive functions. It may be possible to ”get it” using only formal operational structures and English as a language (assuming you have knowledge of physics, biology, psychology etc) but I am not sure. My system is still translating the trans-rational insights into rational ones but it takes time, and information does get lost in the process. A picture says more than a thousand words, which is why we usually talk about ”seeing” it. If someone is genuinely interested in learning it I’m always willing to help, but I’ve given up trying to ”convince” people of it. If they are meant to see it they will, if they are ready for the experiences they will come, if not…
And frankly I’m not sure most people would WANT to understand it. Not just that they are fond of their current world view or perspective, but this tends to entail a radical deconstruction not only of belief structures but also a radical shift in what one thinks of as the ”self”. You are not the same ”person” after you understand it as you were before. So I think there is a lot of existential anxiety around it. The process also tends to activate all the lower cognitive functions that are subconscious in most people. And what is the reward? Nothing! In the end you give up everything you thought you were, laugh about the whole thing and go ”Oh shit… I’m never going to be able to explain this to people… they will all think I am crazy!”. So you may want to wait until it becomes mainstream, which might take a while.
The mechanism of the psyche and its development is pretty well mapped and it seems like the main lines and streams of development are universal. Everyone goes from sesnori-motor to symbolic to conceptional to concrete operational and to formal operational if their development isn’t arrested. It unfolds in the same order for everyone, but how far you get depends on your individual programming as well as your culture. If you are raised by a tribe in the Amazonian you are unlikely to get to formal operational since the culture in general does not support the higher levels. The Western Enlightenment was basically a cultural shift of consciousness from concrete operational (mythic, authoritative, ethnocentric) to formal operational (rational, democratic, world-centric). Next step should logically be that we make a collective push for the next cognitive layer, making vision logic into the norm rather than something special only accessible to an elite few.
I am not looking for this thread to be an exposition on mind/body dualism. Those posts are super long and esoteric. And since Spinoza’s model rejects dualism and that is what the thread is about it would be great to move on. I’m no mod, but thought I would share my thoughts as the OP.
Given that a definition of Consciousness can’t be agreed on, understanding Spinoza’s model and thoughts on it is what led to this thread. Again, his model of “best materialistic (scientific) theories” + other, unknowable emanations of God seems to occupy its own space.
I am certainly with you in having no interest in a prolonged back and forth discussion about mind/body dualism Wordman … but I have never been clear on what Spinoza’a model says about it.
I know that that Wiki summary presents an interpretation that he rejected mind/body dualism but then again the point is made that Thought and Extension are without causal connections, i.e., parallelism, and I am not completely clear on what he meant by that.
Other discussions of Spinoza raise the possibility of various interpretations of what Spinoza wrote, beginning with whether or not he believed Thought and Extension were merely the only ways in which the human mind can subjectively perceive the singular substance, or if he believed that Thought and Extension were objectively different in nature. Which leads to a, to my read, increasingly esoteric discussion in section 1.9.4 on “The Nature of the Union of Mind and Body” and how different scholars of Spinoza have interpreted his take on the issue.
There are many ways to interpret what Spinoza believed and many of his concepts were way ahead of their time. He was incredibly influential and prescient in many ways about what science would demonstrate. But he was still of a particular time and place, taking part of debates of the time that fewer of an intellectual bent find as compelling.
What I think does happen, for better or worse, is that many of take from Spinoza the parts that appeal to our extant ways of thought and choose to interpret his writings parsimoniously with those extant ways of thought.
Parallelism? I think of “thought” and the activity of the mind, and the activity within the body (in particular but not necessarily exclusively of the brain) as different levels of analysis and description of the same thing, again, similar to the parallel of understanding water molecules interacting with each other under various conditions and thinking about the dynamics of water as a population of molecules and the characteristics of ice, steam, and fluid dynamics. They are in reality different attributes of the same substance. Neither is a more valid or objectively true level of analysis. Each has its utility.
Is that what he meant? Or nothing of the sort? I don’t know.
Anyway, moving on … I don’t think that a Spinozan view of God precludes a God with a consciousness by the way, even if it precludes it being a consciousness that is comprehensible to our minds. To his phraseology Thought in our minds is a finite mode of the infinite Divine intellect. To use imaging that was outside of his time, it is very much akin to saying that our neurons process information, integrating various dendritic inputs and resulting out various axonal outputs to hosts of other neurons, as part of higher levels of information processing, which altogether result in a brain which does information processing … with what know as “consciousness” as we understand and perceive it being an attribute at the individual level … and that together individuals process information in greater and more complex ways with larger results up to levels of global societies … which could theoretically have some Thought attribute incomprehensible to our level of analysis just as much as what “consciousness” for the brain is incomprehensible to the level of a neuron. Continuing that line of thought, one way that some theoreticians are looking at the nature of the universe today is that the universe is, at it most fundamental core, all most primarily just information … or minimally that the patterns of information are a/the fundamental attribute … thus all of the universe to this way of thinking is processing information at grander and grander levels and our little brains are just one small aspect of that experiencing that level of information processing as we do, very differently than the greater whole does, but consistent with a concept that the greater whole does as well. Support for that conceptualization comes from what we know about the behaviors of many complex chaotic systems: the tendency of such systems to develop self-similar patterns on different levels of analysis (popularized by the imagery of fractals and the ubiquity of that repeating self-similarity of such systems within the natural world, which Spinoza would describe as Extension).
But that concept of a conscious/aware God is a very different one than that articulated within most religions, and is very divorced from a transcendent personal one. And while fun to think about ultimately matters naught. It does however raise the mind/body duality problem to the Divine level: the immanence of incomprehensible Divine Thought as a parallel process to physical Extension of the universe, including all those physical aspects that are in very real ways unknowable to us.