I think much of this comes down to temperament.

Yes, I agree. It depends on the person, although I would point out that we are on a site frequented by deep thinkers, who often look into these issues, although more in the direction of metaphysics.

I've never really found myself wondering why there is something rather than nothing, or even why we’re here. To me, those questions feel like they are from the land of cliché.

Au contraire, I am very much interested in these things. Although annoyingly people say things like why do you have to ask these questions, is there something missing in your life. Or something to that effect.
I very rarely meet anyone who is actually prepared to give it some thought.

It’s not that I have any answers. It’s just that the questions themselves have never struck me as urgent or necessary.

Actually, I know no more than you, which is the logical conclusion of my position. But this is not to negate the role of the apophatic route, or the realisation that if one were to know, nothing would change. So what is the difference between one, who does know and one who doesn’t? A bit of a zen posture. I can say more than one might expect about the subject from this position.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'ascended beings', they're not part of the framework I know.

I reference this as all the major religions have such beings and infer that you personally can become one of these beings by practicing the religion. It would be remiss of me to leave them out.

Well, I don’t understand it, so there’s that. :razz: Logical fallacies aside, I suppose my intuition is that we understand some things. We’ve learned to make things work; we’ve developed remarkably effective models, tools, and narratives to account for what we observe. But does that amount to genuine understanding?

That’s not quite what I’m trying to get at. It’s more that the answer to our origin, the reasons why there is a world like this etc, might be really easy to understand, but that no one has bothered to tell us, or are waiting for us to figure it out on our own. All the ascended beings could be sitting by our side*, but we can’t but see it. And when one of them turns to us and explains it. We would say, we’ll blow me down, it was so obvious, I don’t know why I failed to see it.

*if one collapses time and space, they literally are sitting by our side, or in the same point as ourselves.

I personally don't know that the world makes sense, but I accept that humans have some pragmatic relationship that allows us to get certain things done.

Yes, something’s don’t make sense, although most things do. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow and that when we sit down to lunch, we will eat it rather than it eat us. But when it comes to discussing things beyond the world we know, we can’t make these assumptions. This limits what we can say considerably.

Are there many serious people who would make such a claim? The main conceit of science seems to be the idea that the world is understandable, which is a metaphysical position.

We’ll there probably aren’t many people who overtly make such a claim and philosophers are quite open minded about this. But there is an implicit assumption in human nature that the world we know and those who have investigated and thought about it in depth are right. This also manifests in a deeper way, in that we are blind to the other, the other that is beyond our known world. This is understandable, as this is all we know, but it puts us in the position where we have to account for any implicit bias that this leaves us with.

A legitimate answer. But given what you've said about our ant-like limitations, one could also argue (using this frame) that God is our own creation; a comforting teddy bear to help us face the unknown.

Yes, I was coming to that, God is entirely our own invention*, but actually this doesn’t bring us any closer to an understanding. Because God is used in our culture to discuss, or provide explanation of our origin. So the question remains. By what means did we arrive in this world we find ourselves in?

Perhaps one could dismiss the whole question as pointless, because the answer could be anything, just take your pick. It could be the Flying Spaghetti Monster who delivered us. Or a big bang, or something mundane and inconceivable to us. We are just here, rather than not here. But this brings me back to the issue I brought up. We really don’t know and yet there could well be some kind of agency, or being responsible for our arrival. Or there really might not be. Both possibilities result in really deep questions about what is really going on here. Questions that put everything we know aside and leave us profoundly blind to reality, the reality of this issue.

*I am well aware of people who have been contacted, or communed in some way with God, or divine beings. So they perhaps have a claim to some knowledge of God. But I am putting this to one side for now, as it may become a distraction from my point.

I tend to avoid threads about God, but this isn’t so much about God as about how we discuss God, or think about the issue.

My position hasn’t been laid out so far as I can see in the thread. Although the apophatic approach has been mentioned in passing. But philosophers don’t seem to be all that interested in this sort of position.

The first point I would make is that we don’t know, but not just that we don’t know, but how could we know? and if we did know, what would we know? Because it may be something that we are incapable of knowing, or understanding. There may not be anything to know and if there is why would it necessarily conform with what we regard as rational, or plausible.

Furthermore, we are sort of assuming that we are in a world that makes rational, or logical sense. Follows the laws of nature for example. How do we know this? When it comes to what it is that’s going on in which we find ourselves here in this world we inhabit. Or that anything to do with our origins does too.

I could go on and in greater depth, but you probably know now where I’m coming from.

Another approach is to realise that all this talk in this thread is just chitta chatta in our heads. A discourse framed and hosted by a certain kind of organism which has developed an organ (the brain) which works quite well in solving problems to do with survival of the organism. We are rather like(an analogy I like to use) an ant walking across a mobile phone that happens to be placed across his trail. The ant has no idea what he is walking across, other than its shape and surface texture. It certainly has no idea, if it is even capable of having ideas, what that phone represents in terms of the evolution of animate objects.
And yet, a bold ant might stand there and claim “I am the pinnacle of evolution, I know everything about how the world works. Speaking in ant of course and confined within the limits of that language.

Are we like this ant, who just happens to be standing on a mobile phone? Proclaiming in our own little language that we understand everything, how we got here, why we are here etc etc.

Perhaps the best thing we can say about God, or referring to God, is the one about which nothing can be said.

Thank you for your considered response, it’s appreciated. You covered a lot of ground and I may only focus in on one or two points for brevity.
Firstly my comments about faith and other facets of being as something about being, independent of thought. Was only a comment about faith. Not about spiritual enquiry in general, which does involve the intellect and mind, teaching, learning and understanding. I thought it important to make this distinction at the outset. Rather like as you say here;

But what one says about this, I do. What IS an intimation of the divine? You don't think there is a language that can talk about this? But there is. It's not what you think, though. Talking about such things is talk about the presuppositions of ordinary affairs. God is not abstract and remote, as I am guessing you agree, but is IN the world of lived experience; ignored absurd to talk about, but there to be discussed.

We need to go beyond the presuppositions of ordinary affairs and I am saying that there are fundamental aspects of self and being, such as certain examples of faith which are not part of the conscious(thinking) mind. So in this enquiry we must deal with things inaccessible to the thinking mind. This has been done formally in the various schools, however for the mystic it is primarily a personal journey, perhaps guided by these teachings. Personal in the sense that it involves a synthesis and subtle relationship between the intellect, the self and the being. Revealing knowing and understanding which requires direct experience and practice.

I have had a look at Husserl and see parallels with his ‘problem of constitution’, the state of ‘astonishment’ and the developing of a ground. With what I generally describe as questing. The aspirant quests so as to strip away his/her preconceptions, conditioning and habits of thought. Working within a spiritual framework of teachings.

This inevitably brings me to the next question of when one reaches this point of a clear ground and is proficient in the practice of astonishment and constitution. What happens next? Where does the phenomenologist go from there?

But what is this "science of orientation"?

It is a phrase I have coined, there is no peer reviewed scientific establishment, or body of literature. However all the schools that I have looked into have a teaching and practice which amounts to the same thing. To put it as simply as I can. It is the process of the alignment of the conscious self with the divine self and by inference the divine. The result being that one lives a religious, or spiritual life guided by the divine. Which crucially involves the process of the transfiguration of the self.

The reason I keep emphasising this is that in these schools the focus is on developments and changes within the self. Rather like the unfurling of the petals of a flower, this process is already developed, or growing within us and is simply being facilitated in this unfurling.

The moment you start explaining this, you begin a kind of intellectualizing, for things have to make sense, and they don't belong to everyday accounts, but somehow stand outside of these, yet everydayness is not separated, and if you don't talk about this kind of thing, you could get things wrong interpretatively and you could be missing important contributions to your understanding of what you are doing.

This is a concern and any novice should enroll in an established school, so as to follow a long established and tested ideology. But here we are discussing this as people who already have an understanding of these things and are just exchanging thoughts about it.

Of course, if you are going for the truly radical, sequestering yourself from all mundane assumptions, retiring to a meditation mat for a program of self annihilation because intimations of divinity are so clear and compelling, then I can hardly complain. I actually believe in such things, and I know people who have made this move to close off entanglements. And see what Meister Eckhart says about attachments:

Christian ascetics are some of the most strict practitioners, however there are alternative teachings and practice which are not so stark. Many mystics live a “normal” life. I don’t agree with what you write in this passage;

For those that are IN, the world "sticks" to the understanding as an indissoluble bond. These are engaged people, so confident that everything is what it IS, because doing something is done best in full immersion, and foundational doubt rarely touches this world. Foundational doubt is the absolute "out" of such engagement.

For me this is a description of what I would call a fiery aspirant. Someone who is forcing their practice to initiate some kind of initiation, or crisis, through which they will emerge in some kind of purified, or transfigured state. Also I assure you there are very few people who have absolute certainty around these things.
I would suggest that there are many who live a relatively normal life, but who have undergone some developments in the self and hold no deeply held beliefs, or faith. But who have in themselves grown to a point, like in my analogy of the flower, where they are unfurling. Some even entirely unaware. In this circumstance, they may emerge out of some development in their life even more purified, or transfigured than the fiery aspirant.

Anyway, my point being that faith and the way it is held and used by people is not reliant on any philosophy, while often accompanied by a philosophy, which by its presence enriches the experience of being a person of faith.

One could argue: posture, practice, direction, communion are all questions: what posture, practice, etc., should be done, accepted, believed?

Well yes there is a role for the intellect in these refinements. But what I am alluding to is an interplay between the intellect and being, or self. The intellect alone cannot bridge the gap between the intellect/personality/ego and the essence of one’s being, or self. Or another way of describing this is that if one accepts that there is a divinity within one’s being, then the intellect/personality/ego is required to accommodate this and reach an interactive orientation (communion) with that divinity. Thus allowing that divinity to progressively play a greater role in the life of the person.

This is what I call the science of orientation*, this is a process of adapting aspects of self to become in alignment with that divinity. Rather like an astrolabe where the dials are turned, aligned with observations in the world, or the skies, to take an accurate reading.

These things can be done absent the intellect through prayer, or meditation. So in a very real sense faith and belief are not the product of thinking but rather prayer, or communion. Although the intellect can play a role for thinkers in this process. So yes philosophy is a useful practice for those who have an intellectual inquiry.

This gives epistemology the privileged place among the rest, because prior to anything that is accepted as true and important, there is the question of knowing this to be the case.

Again, I’m not denying this, but rather saying that this intellectual enquiry is not fundamental to the practice. In a real sense it doesn’t matter what God, or Cosmogony one follows (within reason), one takes one’s pick of the schools or religions available. Also there is not a requirement for the existence, or nature of God to be established. Truth is another matter, but can be accommodated through humility and a focus on the simple path to divinity within the self.

I mean, before one goes about being directed, one has to have a well grounded belief for doing so.

Yes, however this is often a calling, an insatiable need to find out, a sense of the divine. Belief doesn’t necessarily come before these other motivating factors. But yes for the novice it is advisable to join an established school, or broaden one’s reading as wide as possible. To go out into the world to live a rounded life within a community to ground the self. Although for some people these things all come naturally, intuitively. It is also not advisable for people with childhood trauma, psychological issues etc.

Faith in what?

We may be talking of different understandings of faith. For me I would substitute the word belief for faith here. Belief is more about the narrative one has developed and is an intellectual development. Whereas faith is not necessarily associated with any particular narrative, but is more a feeling, emotion, conviction.

But then there is Husserl, and the neoHusserlian strain of thought that is very active today.

This sounds interesting, I am not well read in academic philosophy, I would be interested to learn more in this direction.


*When I say the science of orientation, I am referring to the practice of the alignment of the person with the divine as practiced in different ways within the different religious and spiritual schools. This will eventually I expect become a scientific practice. Which it has already to an extent become within Hinduism in the yogic traditions.

What defensible core?

I would say reduced to the God in each of us, that essence of self or divinity/atman in each of us.

I see the distinction, I wasn’t thinking of lifestyle as a choice so much as a direction of travel that one had arrived at. That lifestyle, or practice that is adopted initially would develop into a way of life through an evolution.
The ways in which a person reaches these stages would be unique to each person, there would be epiphany, revelation, calling, questioning, exploration and choices. The evolution would progress through stages, of realisation, crisis and initiation. A path to be trodden.

There are due to their origins a number of schools(philosophies/religions) through which a believer/aspirant may come to their faith. Some more orthodox, some more devotional, some more meditation based. Some in which a deity is front and centre, others where any deity is barely defined.

Also their are people who explore a number of schools and then follow their own path and people who follow a path, unaware that they are, thinking perhaps that they have no faith, or interest in religious, or spiritual matters at all.

it, I think we should be thinking of faith as not merely a peculiarity of some people, but as about the foundations of whatever form life a human being pursues - however inchoate and unreflective.

Yes, for the religious, the aspirant, faith is the touchstone of their lives. For these people faith is with them all the time and becomes a connection through communion with their divinity, to their unique spiritual ideology. This is very much about lifestyle and practice(service), whereas beliefs are confined to the ideology, the narrative of the person and are more abstract. Also such faith does not need a defined object, a God, or reality in which they have that faith. Like humility it is about the person as a being, his/her posture, rather than part of a philosophical, or theological narrative.

It is, as with the Buddhists and the Hindus and Meister Eckhart and Dionysius the Areopogite and other spiritualists and mystics, an apophatic method: delivering thought, well, from itself. then realizing you had all the questions wrong. Not the answers, but the questions.

Quite, but not just the questions, also posture, practice, direction, communion.

Faith is a broad brush phrase in this kind of discussion and needs to be teased out.

Religious faith is an inevitable consequence of one’s approach to, or questioning of our origin, creation, purpose. If one is to make any progress beyond, “I/we don’t know”. Science and philosophy can’t help us. Other than in describing the world and how it works and helping us to order and refine our thoughts.

There is faith in God, faith in redemption, faith in society and human interaction. Faith in oneself, faith in truth. Faith as a tool used in mysticism, or by the ascetic.

Forgive me, I have a satirical bent. I would engage more, but I don’t have the breadth of reading in philosophy, or in Western philosophy. I come from the perspective of eastern philosophy, or Theosophy.

For me empiricism includes the contents of mind, so is regarded as universal. I don’t have the divide between idealism and positivism(I’m not sure if this is even the right word) and find it a means, or excuse, for argument, rather than anything else.

I know, I guess they are a broken force now. They may have disintegrated as a coherent force. They might be holding on to the remaining hostages as some kind of get out clause.

The whole situation is inconceivably horrific and intractable. We need the one person who can stop this to act. But for some reason he won’t.

I looked up the word poon in the urban dictionary. I guess you don’t mince your words.

I doubt it would slow down the ethnic cleansing at all and Netanyahu would claim the credit for getting them released. The reality is that Israel can’t stop here, they’ve passed the point of no return. They will only now feel secure when every Palestinian is removed from Israel and they have surrounded themselves with heavily armed buffer zones.

The only alternative is the intervention of a large scale international peace keeping force. But the international community is not stepping forward.

Two days ago during a White House press briefing, Trump showed a video of a what he described as a mass grave in South Africa. There were hundreds of white crosses with a group of people standing by the graves in grief apparently. He then claimed it was a genocide against white people.

The video and the claims about it being a mass grave is a conspiracy theory propagated by the far right in the US and in other countries.

In reality, it was a protest following the murder of a white couple, the crosses were symbolic, there were no graves and the people there were the protesters. Trump is broadcasting false conspiracy theories from the White House.

some.

Well, what would you think if you had stadiums of Israelis yelling "kill the Palestinian," led by major politicians?
— BitconnectCarlos

“BitconnectCarlos, they already do that!”

ssu

They have literally done that today, at the wailing wall rather than a stadium. It’s being broadcast on the world media. They’re dancing and chanting with Ben-Gvir egging them on. Fully aware that they’re committing a genocide on their neighbours.

It’s a reminder that human nature includes the potential for groups to kill and Iradicate other groups and feel morally justified in doing so. So it is incumbent upon world leaders to call it out where it happens and prevent it. There is one person, one world leader, alone who can stop this in one day and he is noticeably silent on the issue.

Yes, reality could be very simple and yet we don’t know it. We could be staring it in the face and still not have a clue. Maybe we know it, but not with our mind, but rather with our body, being.

It’s interesting to consider how much we don’t know, while seeming to know a lot. Indeed what we do know is tiny compared to what we don’t. But it’s easy to remain blind to what we don’t know and just accept what we do know as what there is, or even all there is.

I’m not sure that Apustimelogist doesn’t understand transcendental idealism. But rather he’s continually testing it from a positivist standpoint. But I don’t think that gap can necessarily be bridged. Because the positivist says I can measure, test, observe, recognise, describe etc the world we are in and if there is anything else to it, show it to me so I can measure it? If you can’t, then why should I accept that it is there at all?
Also that I have all the understanding etc that I need to do my thinking already in the world I am experiencing already. So all this philosophising about the logic of considering idealism is just a thought experiment, a tongue twister, nothing more.

So I don’t think this is an exercise in getting someone to understand the other’s point of view, necessarily. They may well understand it well enough already, but rather an exercise in explaining away the gap which needs bridging between the two opposing views. To build so many bridges that the gap is imperceptible any more, or that the gap is nothing more than a wrinkle in a whole and that there isn’t really a gap.

I like thought experiments and your mountain experiment works well for me. Another way of seeing it is from the standpoint of life as a whole, rather than the mountain, as one unit, all life as one being.

So all life is one entity, or being and in the world we find ourselves in, this being is budded, or cloned into millions of parts, or sub-beings. Which we see as all the living organisms on the planet. Each sub-being experiences the world differently depending on which part, or portion of the being they are. So an ant, experiences the world differently to a bat for example.

Now this being might be the origin of both those sub-beings and all that they experience, indeed the world might be a facet of that being which is experienced as a physical world of experiences through a process of becoming. A process of becoming a mind, which then experiences the world that it is budded into.

The world these sub-beings experience isn’t an externally existing world of physical objects, external to the greater being, but a product, or projection of that being, experienced differently by the different classes of sub-being. Mind and the world mind experiences, may be two sides of the one coin of being a being and all part of the one being. Time and extension(space and material), are produced from and by the being.


This thought experiment opens a bridge to understand how the physical world may be a “projection” of mind, and not external, while appearing to be.

Not at all. Just remember that it was South Africa that made the case against Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. That is why there's this large effort to tarnish the image of South Africa.

Yes, but this whole conspiracy has been cooked up because the oppressed people in an apartheid state are now in charge. Fuelled by people sympathetic to an other apartheid state.

They claim a genocide (falsely), while denying the other genocide, which is actually happening before our eyes.

It’s interesting that the irony is lost in this pivot to a genocide in South Africa. The only other country in the world, apart from Israel which was an apartheid state. It demonstrates what a poisonous practice it is.

have you apologized for spreading blood libels yet?

I am reminded of the story which went around the world within a few hours, in outrage, of 40 beheaded babies.

I see now, so anyone who doesn’t apologise for criticising Israel is an anti semite and of course, you are not critical of Israel committing genocide on a people they regard as animals.

I want a government that does not prefer any one race. Double standards, unfortunately, exist.

So you condemn the Israeli government then?

Now that the genocide is in full flow and there is an acute crisis in which 14,000 babies could die in the next 48 hours*. Will Donald Trump act, or turn his back on them. Again he has been warned, he will not be able to claim he did not know about it. As there is an intense international effort underway today to get the required aid into Gaza. It is sitting on the border and Tom Fletcher is making every effort to get the trucks in today.

*according to the UN aid chief, Tom Fletcher.

Sachs's points in summary:
- Trump pursues the right policy on Israel and Ukraine, namely peace.
- Trump's approach is effective.
- If successful, this could end 30 years of aggressive US(-Israeli) foreign policy, which would be historic.

What? If Trump want’s to stop these two wars all he has to do is freeze military aid to Isreal and threaten Putin with serious action on blocking oil and bank transactions and increasing military aid to Ukraine. He could end both wars in one day if he did that.

I spent an evening in a hotel room in Athens during the Greek financial crisis. While trying to find something to watch on the TV, I found a Channel devoted to proposing the virtues of wine for cats. There were bottles of wine with a picture of a cat on the label and they showed it being fed to cats in a bowl.

It will be interesting to see if Trump is ok with this amount of blood on his hands. I doubt he expected that he would have to play a role in two genocidal wars when he decided to run again.

Now is the time act, let’s see if Trump will act to prevent a genocide when he has been given full warning. If he fails to act, he will have blood on his hands.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-15/un-aid-chief-urges-security-council-to-prevent-genocide-in-gaza/105293790

Now is the time act, let’s see if Trump will act to prevent a genocide when he has been given full warning. If he fails to act, he will have blood on his hands.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-15/un-aid-chief-urges-security-council-to-prevent-genocide-in-gaza/105293790

Still we will continue to ask the question, what is real? With good reason and what is real will continue to slap us in the face, or stare back at us in the mirror.

Retired police officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet

You parroting gutter press again. Won’t you ever learn.

Not according to Kant, and I have some sympathy with his way of seeing things. In my interpretation of what he said, time is something we bring to the world.

I also have some sympathy with this, but I suppose I lend more weight to ideas that the external world is more external than that and has an existence apart from our minds. Although I don’t see an either/or dichotomy here. Both things could be so and our reduction to either/or, where this happens, as a limited interpretation.

Subjective time is a substance:

You seem to have smuggled in the concept of substance here. Does substance describe a thing, something that has objective existence? Or is substance a substance of mind, or intellect, or something immaterial?

2 By substance, I mean something that exists and has a set of properties.

Does something exist if it is an invention of thought?

What do you think of Bertrand Russell's views on time:

That’s someone trying to formulate a logical language that explains things about time. The problem with logic is it can be difficult to relate it to things outside the mind. Our mind was born into a place with time (and space) therefore time was a priori to mind. So our mind and its contents are a peculiarity, a product of, time (and space) and other aspects of that existence. To make any progress outside of our mind we must find a metric independent of mind. Hence science and we know what science has found out about this existence.

Hollywood has gone to crap.

Hollywood went to crap 30, or 40 years ago. This is just the icing on the cake.

I said developments. Also there are actions, like the U.S. military ceasing it’s delivery of promised arms to Ukraine as a bargaining chip in negotiating a deal(the minerals deal).

The action of conducting secret negotiations with Russia concerning European land, interests and security from which European representatives where excluded.

Apart from what Trump has said. He has single-handedly put the commitments and trust in the NATO alliance at risk of collapse. His actions have destroyed a hard won commitment to it’s values.

It doesn’t take a lot to destroy trust and once destroyed those who have lost it move on. Knowing that it takes time and commitment to restore it.

Straw man then, as I wasn’t talking about what some politicians said.

And some things change and some things don’t.

I was talking about developments. Developments are more concrete than words from individuals. They are changes in status agreed on by large numbers of people. A status which had become outdated and strained. It probably only needed a nudge to bring it about.

Your whole argument that European countries are lazy and just expect the US to carry the can all the time is false. It was a legacy of the post war settlement.