Is "existing at all times" consistent with your view? This would preclude a caused object from existing eternally.

No this not my view. My view is open ended, that we are trying to address things which can’t necessarily be understood by our brand of rationality, or that can be demonstrated, conceptually, or in principle from the limited knowledge pool of human knowledge. So when I say eternity, I mean beyond the horizon of our knowledge, or what we can say about it.

This statement was wrong: "There is no escape from infinite regression". I provided the escape- an epistemic reason a person might reject an infinite regress. You apparently aren't persuaded by this, and that's fine - because the "escape" is not a proof of impossibility.

I don’t know enough about foundationalism to reply. But I find the escape to be accepting an apparent paradox. That there is an uncaused, or ultimate ground. That uncaused is unexplainable, just like an infinite regression is unexplainable.

However, it seems to me that we can't justify believing in anything specific that is beyond that which is accessible - other than the fact you stated.

I don’t see a need to justify hypothetical scenarios, but I am interested in them. As much as a means of breaking free of the shackles of rational thought on the issue. Or as a means of contrasting, or shining a light on how our knowledge is blind to things about our existence. I don’t think belief is useful here because it’s an issue of hypotheticals, in the knowledge that none of it is verifiable (outside personal experience).

Google "Kalam Cosmological Argument" - a "first cause" argument for God. Yes, they universally believe God is eternal: existing at all times, past and future.

Yes, I’m familiar with the argument.
Putting the use of infinity to one side for a moment. A God which is eternal, existing at all times, past and future, is in no way infinite. As I said I am treating eternal as very big so to speak, but not infinite. But rather as beyond a horizon, beyond which it is indistinguishable from the infinite.

You're wrong. An infinite series of causes is avoided by assuming a first cause. An infinite series of layers of reality is avoided by assuming a bottom layer. These are what metaphysical foundationalism is all about.

Thanks for the link, I’ll have a deeper look.
Although, I would suggest that saying I’m wrong is a bit hasty. I am suggesting that infinity only exists as a concept, a concept in the mind of humans. Applying that to reality (external to that mind) is a bit tenuous.

That's a personal choice. But here's the issue: an infinite series exists without explanation: each individual cause is explained by a prior cause, but the series as a whole is unexplained.

Yes, I know, but I don’t see us explaining it using philosophy (logic), but rather that entertaining it is rather like looking at one of those Escher paintings of stairs going up and joining themselves lower down due to a trick of perspective. I know it may have uses in logic and maths, but when applied to existence it just throws up absurdities.

Our limited minds are the only minds we know exist, and we are utilizing these minds to speculate and judge the nature of existence. Is there more than this physical world? It's possible, but there's no way to know. So we speculate and apply reason. Different people accept different answers. No one can be proven right or wrong.

I agree that no one can be proven right or wrong. But as to the question of is there more than this physical world. I would think it highly unlikely that there isn’t. Simply because in the grand scheme of things, we are insignificant and our newly found powers of reason have only worked with what we have found in front of us when we each came to be in this world. It would be rather grandiose for us to conclude that this that we see before us is all there is.

Yet I have trouble envisioning the IDF taking and occupying Tehran. And this is the real problem here: attacking Iran is problematic, because a land war would be very, very difficult.

It would require the U.S. to take Tehran, this is what the hawks and the Israeli lobby are trying to convince Trump to do now. Hopefully there is someone with a level head in that room.

Wouldn't that form be a sort of "debunking argument?"

Reminds me of the heady days of the Jref forum.

[1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
[2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
[3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

King James Bible.

It looks like a ground of being to me.

it strikes me as a rather extreme assumption to think that such a being just happens to exist uncaused.

(from your post that I responded to)
I’m not aware of people claiming the “God” is uncaused. They say God is eternal.

By contrast, the gradual development of beings, somewhere in an old. vast universe, with the capacity for intentional behavior, but considerably more limited powers to act, seems considerably more plausible.

(From your post that I responded to)

But in such a vast universe the gradual development of eternal beings* who can create grounds of being may be just as likely.

Right. There's either an infinite regression of ever-smaller parts/of causes/ of explanations - or there is a foundation of all these - the ultimate ground.

(From your last reply to me)

There is no escape from infinite regression, this is a peculiarity of human thought, there is no plausible likelihood that infinity can be considered external to the human mind. So this whole preoccupation with infinity is a human preoccupation around this peculiarity. It’s turtles all the way down remember.

“ultimate ground” (isn’t this what the book of Genesis describes above) seems like wishful thinking aswell. It seems more plausible that there are no ultimate grounds out there, only relatively ultimate grounds. That this also recedes into eternity, seems much more plausible to me.

Also where you say plausible, presumably this is plausible to our limited minds which are designed to operate in this physical world we find ourselves in. So there is a kind of implicit bias there.

* by eternal, I am not suggesting any infinities, just a state or position outside or within, our observable reality, or something inconceivable to us.

Apologies, I missed your first post addressing this, the other day;

IMO, the philosophical accounts do not point to a God of religion. There may very well be a ground of being, but the big question is: does it exhibit intentionality? If not, then it points to a natural ground of being, not a god.

Is there a good reason to believe the ground of being acts intentionally? IMO, the only reason one might think so, is that teleology requires it - so the question becomes: is there good reason to believe teleology? I haven't seen one.

So this indicates to me that a ground of being is “ the very source and foundation of all existence.”(wiki)
Or the role played by a god (in an Abrahamic religion), ie created everything, creating the ground on which we walk. Not a metaphysical ground.

The post you linked to here seemed to be discussing things about infinite regression.

This is the opposite of what is meant by a metaphysical ground. See this. A complex object is grounded in its composition, not the reverse.

I’m only using ground in the terms you used it in the post I replied to.

Such a God would not be the ground of being.

Not necessarily. Let me explain it by describing a cosmogony in which the ground of being for an individual being is the body of a greater being and the body of that individual is the ground of being for a lesser being.

Just look at a human, it is a colony of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of cells. For each cell that human may be perceived as the ground of being. Likewise the being of the planet, or the biosphere, or Gaia, is the ground of being for the human. And by extension, for Gaia the galaxy is the ground of being. This has to be seen through the prism of an idealism where the Individual being on this scale, or hierarchy experiences a world commensurate with their position, or level of development in the hierarchy. That for a human the experience of the cell, or Gaia is inconceivable, because it is an entirely different set of circumstances, which are only intelligible to the being on that level in the hierarchy.

In this cosmogony the human world of physics and science is not everything that is, it is only a description of the experience on our level of the hierarchy. On the other levels, it would be inconceivable because they experience an entirely different set of circumstances.

By contrast, the gradual development of beings, somewhere in an old. vast universe, with the capacity for intentional behavior, but considerably more limited powers to act, seems considerably more plausible.

But God might be one of these beings, with powers which seem unlimited from our tiny perspective.

A process of subconsiously occuring deep learning.

Yes, I agree with that. Although what I was getting at is a growth, or development in the being, so there may be some kind of learning in a biological sense. But more of a flowering process, or metamorphosis. Something deeper than physical biology, perhaps, more on the level of a soul, or atman (baggage accepted).

So the being goes through the process as a result of this deeper transformation. The mind, (including the subconscious), or intellect is playing no more than a supportive role.

FWIW, what you describe here is quite consistent with deep learning occuring in the neural networks of our brains. So, based on neuroscience, there is good reason to think we are all unintentionally going through it. Of course, it might be beneficial to realize that deep learning is prone to "hallucinations".

Yes and yes. But what is “going through it” referring to?

However, over the years, a number of them have come to question those experiences - while not necessarily becoming atheists, they’ve grown increasingly skeptical about it all. I'm not claiming any definitive knowledge here, but I'm struck by how easily people seem to fall into and out of and sometimes back into beliefs.

Yes, I have seen this as well, (I was involved for a decade during the 1990’s). Traditionally (prior to the New Age movement) people would have a calling, which would mean that they became involved for a deeper seated reason than most churchgoers. The same with New Age, many people became drawn in to the movement who didn’t have a calling, or because friends and colleagues introduced them on a more social level.
Furthermore I am of the opinion that people only go beyond the initial impulse, or experience because they have an innate predisposition for that way of life. Myself being an example, I was seeking this out from a young age, by the time I was 12, I was studying two or three types of divination and reading anything I could lay my hands on that was philosophical, or theological.

Regarding the direction of a guru, the way I see it is that the guru is a conduit and is not necessarily conscious of what they are doing in terms of guiding the pupil. Rather, that it is as much something in the pupil drawing out from the teacher what they need to learn. I am coming to this from the perspective that people who are following this course are only partly aware and in charge of what is going on. That it is a more esoteric (putting the baggage of that phrase to one side) process and the pupil and teacher are developing on an underlying unconscious, or soul( baggage accepted) level and may be unaware of what is going on. Also that there are people living ordinary lives going through these processes entirely unaware of it and may have no interest at all in anything religious, or spiritual.

Yes, I realise that and the ability to view the world in this way requires a specific kind of training and understanding which can’t be sufficiently put across in writing. It requires direct experience and usually, although not exclusively direct contact and direction from the guru, or their equivalent.
Although I expect that with the rate of development in IT and AI, it will become possible to do this through technology, in the next generation, or two.

I should add, as we are in a Christian society that monastic life does enable monks to achieve this understanding, although, I have no experience of this personally.

And outside of my experince.

Part of the problem here is that we don’t have the conceptual language to imagine (visualise) such things. Once you do, it’s quite easy to do so. The various traditions teach this knowledge, each in their particular narrative. Although they all amount to pretty much the same thing, with different characters, means and purpose.
What they are teaching is an ability to conceptualise a divinity in the world, the world we inhabit. So that we can develop an ability to see it in action around us a develop deep love and reverence for it in our every day lives, as we perform our daily life activities. The idea being that over time we will exhibit some of the divinity in our lives and society. This role is played in Hinduism by the guru, for example.

Reduced to the conceptual, it has very limited usefulness. The realisation of such a ‘ground’ is ecstatic, outside the conceptual or discursive intellect.

100%

It makes me wonder how much this really is strategy to get rid of the fetters of international law.

International law has been a fragile thing held together by the international bodies. It wasn’t going to survive a breakdown in the coalition of the West. All the authoritarian rulers and oligarchs will be happy to see the end of it.
There may be a bigger picture here. Analysts will have been telling them that the climate crisis is going to hit big time over the next century. There is going to be mass emigration, starvation, food and water shortages. Large areas of the planet will become uninhabitable. Inevitably the rich and powerful will be scrabbling to shield themselves and their groups from the chaos. I see the rise in authoritarianism as a symptom of this. Also there will soon be fights over resources, this is already starting to play out.

My early reading was influenced by mystical traditions, figures like Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Which was tempered somewhat by the mystical pragmatist J Krishnamurti.

Interesting, I see an alignment here with the ideology of the Theosophical society and other attempts in the 19th century to bring Eastern philosophy to the West. Which then spurned the various new age movements, the interest in yoga, and Buddhism. And yet Western philosophy has struggled with these ideas and doesn’t seem able to adopt them, or integrate them.
It seems to be impenetrable to the Aristotlean way of thinking, which is centred around the perception and experience of the human brain. It’s like the human intellect is reified and everything else must be explained through the prism of this intellect, or dismissed in some way.

The blind leading the blind.

Yes it is a tinder box, which is why players shouldn’t play with matches.

I don’t have anything I can point to just now. But at the time there was a lot of discussion about it and subsequently lots of discussion about what they were up to in Iran, long before the Ukraine and Gaza wars.

Yes, but before Trump’s first term in office the Iranians were moving very slowly towards nuclear weapons. This stepped up as soon as Trump tore up the carefully constructed deal when he came into office in 2016.

It was working a dam sight better than when Trump started throwing his weight around.
Now we even have Saudi and Gulf states showing sympathy with Iran. Netanyahu will blow up the whole Middle East and the Orange man will just stand by and it will never occur to him what part he played in it.

No no, he’s still going to get his Nobel Peace prize. It’s 4D chess.

The idea was to keep a lid on Iran, it was working. Until Trump came along. The only way to stop them now is to topple Iran, or invade and occupy. This is now existential for Israel and it didn’t need to be. Still it keeps Netanyahu out of jail a bit longer, I suppose. So much winning.

The hawks are spreading the narrative that Iran could have a workable bomb within 4 days. Even the BBC is repeating this now. It reminds me of the 45 minute claim prior to the Iraq war. They’re all ready to step in if Israel suffers any kind of serious hit.

I don’t think Trump is stealing for a fight here, but the hawks around him surely are. They’ll be saying now is the time to take Iran out, they are weak and Hesbollah are on the back foot.
Trump will go along with it and try to use it to his advantage. Plus it gives Netanyahu cover for the genocide in Gaza and keeps him in power. If Isreal is at war with Iran, he can cancel elections.

It’s all about him looking a tough guy on the day of his parade, tomorrow.

You have to do the Trump voice when he’s being really mean when you say the big in italics.

I've always thought so: intentional agents make goals and the only intentional agents known to us are ourselves, mere humans. Am I missing something?

Don’t forget the dolphin’s, etc..

lol, reminds me of an occasion in my teenage years. I could be found squirrelling away in dusty old secondhand book shops. I happened to be in one in a quieter part of Oxford and found a raggedy little book called The Way of Life by Laotsu. I had no idea who he was, or what the book was about. But I liked the circumstances in which it came to me, so I bought it. It made a lot of sense.

We are human, faith is important in how we got to this point and even beyond this point, it is still important because one is still reliant on the natural world provided for us, even if one can see it in a better light.
The way I see it sometimes is that we need faith up until the point we merge with what it is that provided the natural world(sorry for the garbled language, I’m trying not to use words with baggage). Beyond which we offer faith back in the other direction to the brave people following on behind us.
There’s something of a communion about it.

I know it sounds counter intuitive. It was a way of seeing it, that I was describing. The reality would be more nuanced. This is something I have been working on for some time. That nothing in this world changes, but in the new light, it is seen for what it really is. So the person before the realisation is working with the same stuff, is in the same place in the world, and the person after the realisation is still working with the same stuff in the same place in the world. But something very subtle has changed, but from the viewpoint of the new person, a lot has changed. However if that new person where to try to explain what had changed to themselves before the change, it would be impossible, because everything that they described would be things that he already knew intellectually and from being in the world. None of that would have changed, there would be no new knowledge. Just a subtle change, which could be a new light, or a certain orientation. After all isn’t this what realisation means, a light bulb moment.

So belief or faith is required for the aspirant, because in the absence of the insight which is the actual fruition of that discipline, one only has the faith that it is, in fact, a real possibility. In this Buddhist sutta, the disciple Sariputta says that 'Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction' that nibbana ('gaining a footing in the deathless') is real - whereas those (such as himself) who have 'seen, known, penetrated' etc, would not have to take it on conviction, rather, they would know it directly.

Quite, and a good way of seeing this is that there is no difference between the aspirant before realisation and after realisation.
Or the sum of knowledge before and after the realisation is the same.
There is nothing different between she who knows and she who doesn’t. Because the new knowledge that the knower now knows is the identical knowledge as before. But seen in a different light.

The question is “why”? Why do Americans have to suffer yet again the destruction of their cities, the people in their roadways, the curfews, the violence and looting, the waving of foreign flags on American streets?

We all know why, to stroke Trump’s fragile ego. He want’s his pram to look extra shiny. No worry if some more blood is shed, it’s already in the hundreds of thousands (in proxy wars), beyond a certain point the numbers don’t matter any more.

Yes, that is clearly true. The question is, what more can we usefully say?

There is plenty, but whether it is useful, or not depends to a large part on who we are saying it to and whether they think it is useful.
We can say that it might make someone more constructive and cooperative in their and their family, friends and associates’s lives. It might make the life of the person more peaceful and enjoyable. It could result in the restoration and care of the ecosystem, locally, or globally. It might further their progress towards their liberation from material incarnation. And in the long term, contribute to humanity finding it’s rightful place as the custodian of the ecosystem of the planet and all that would entail.

Sometimes they are conscious and sometimes not. But there doesn't seem to be any agreement how this can be done. (In one way, ordinary language sets our starting-point, but it seems too limited for what we want to do.)

Yes, I know, which is a part of the reason I went elsewhere to do this. There is a language and literature which does this in Eastern philosophy. But translating this into a Western narrative is not easy, Theosophy has tried, but this has not been adopted by Western academics as far as I know.

I would like to treat "ego", "self", "mind" as all equivalent to "person" - unless and until a more detailed and more objective framework can be developed.

Well I can try.

It’s looking like he’s going to invoke the insurrection act on the 14th of June. Protests are organising in all major cities for Trump’s birthday parade. Once that touch paper has been lit there is no way back. The only hope is that enough people in the military refuse to participate.

I have a problem with any theory that divides the person/self into separate elements like this.

Yes, I can see that*. I will continue by addressing the attributes attributed to the ego and the role it plays in a person’s behaviour. Rather than making distinctions in the make up of the self(forgive me if I do so by mistake and please do point it out).
What the Zen master is getting at is that by tethering the ox to the post, one is controlling things like blind passion, envy, greed etc and the psychological tendencies to inflate a sense of self importance, status in social grouping, for example. Or to feel a victim, when you are not, but you are in denial of poor behaviour to someone etc. (this can be a long list, with a lot of detail). These tendencies in human behaviour act as stumbling blocks and hurdles in the practice of stilling the mind and quelling emotions.
What I’m getting at is that a person is able to self reflect and carry out a restructuring of the psychological make up of themselves. Even the emotional make up, although, this is very difficult and usually accommodation is made for this in the practice. Also that in the spiritual scenario, to rebuild the self in the image of, and guidance of a deity. Hence the goal of enlightenment etc.

Yet you seem to be able to tell this story without the help of the analysis, until the very last moment, when you revert to the "ego", and I want to say that it is your ego that took you through the process of training that allows you to grab hold of the ego and tether it (yourself).

I would place this in the context of an internal process within the self, which does not necessarily require a thorough analysis. There are checks and balances and analysis going on, but in a personal form and language. When you say “ego”, presumably you are referring the the thinking person, the mind. The mind and thinking might be able to convey the process, but the practice of the process may include, emotions (the endocrine system) and the body (the animal, the primate, which we are).

I have no idea what a Zen master would say about this story, but I say that the point is that you have not tethered yourself, but set yourself free. Or rather, you were taking the process as a process of tethering, but now you can see it as a process of freeing yourself.

It is a process which includes control, restriction etc, in order to free, through crisis. Or another way to see it, would be a way of getting out of a rut.

* I come to this with a history of seeing the self as made up of different parts. Sometimes 3, sometimes 5, or 7, or 12. So will find it difficult to go into detail without referring to this.

They are not rioters, they are demonstrating in protest to bands of anonymous vigilante groups abducting people without due process, in their communities, directed from the White House. But you know that don’t you.

Yes, I understand that the ego is the ox. But who is it that tames the ox/ego? The story would lose its point if we could imagine the ox willingly submitting to the tamer. You speak of "one" or "me", which seems to be neither ox nor ego.

This can become complicated when we use phrases like ego. Ego can mean different things, not only different aspects of the self, but it could be the whole self, or just something that the self uses, in it’s tool box so to speak. I make the distinction between ego, personality and being(sentient). Although, there could be more than three parts to the person. We are after all talking about a narrative used by people, involved in religious, or spiritual schools with their own terminology and I’m trying not to get into that, if possible.
So I would say, it is the being, working with the personality who wrestles with the ego.

I sometimes think that the journey is something that happens to us adn which we cope with as best we can, rather than being something that we decide to do.

Yes, of course and both happening at the same time, as well. I adhere to the view that it is mainly something that happens to us and that a propensity, or calling, towards such a lifestyle may be a result of that.

The ego has to be tamed like the ox in Zen is tethered to the post.
— Punshhh
Yes, but how do I decide who is the ego and who the ox-tamer?

This is the most crucial crisis in the life of someone who seeks to serve (in these terms), to follow a spiritual life, or to seek the divine. To be able to make right choices. It is necessary because otherwise one will end up navel gazing.

There is a process where one questions oneself, asks for guidance, tries to live by the example of saint’s, or prophets. Fails, has crises of conscience etc etc. For each person it is different. For me it was a combination of a faith in guidance and the realisation of good. The power of good, can when you want to do good, or have goodwill, is like an accumulator. As each act of good, or kindness and its rewards are experienced it colours your way of life etc. Rather like acts of service, or compassion. Eventually a purification takes place. For faith in guidance, one offers freely to be guided, to follow the guidance. Where the guidance isn’t so much in the external world, but internally. In a sense, one is offering up one’s liberty, freedom to follow selfish thoughts and desires. To put other’s needs before oneself, to put the guidance before oneself. A tipping point is reached beyond which there is a strength of feeling and knowledge that one is living a gooder life and yet not feeling the lesser for it, but the more for it. Again a tipping point is reached beyond which one can grab hold of and tether the ego.

From what I’ve seen, the experience is often all about ‘one truth for all' so how could we expect restraint? Intellectual honesty seems to me to be a separate project. Are we really expecting those touched by the divine to say, ‘I encountered a higher power and I know we are all one, but I’ll keep it in perspective because intellectually this is the right thing to do?'

This is one of the crosses to bear, for the believer, or mystic. They have beholden truths which for a number of reasons they cannot impart to their friends, family and associates and yet they must continue life as normal.

But none of this is by definition. The essence of God is not determined such that definitional proofs can simply be brought forth.

If God doesn’t fall within these and the more established definitions of God, then it is not God, it is something else.
If it’s something else, well that’s fine, provided it fulfills the tasks that we ascribe to God. If it’s something else and it doesn’t fulfill its tasks, then it’s not God, or anything to do with God and why would someone refer to it as God?

One has to drop everything, just as empirical science has dropped nearly everything evolving through the centuries, dropped and added through endless paradigms (as Kuhn puts it) that hold sway and then yield

Yes, I have dropped any mention of God, in my own life and in conversation,(except where God is being addressed directly). You brought it up, I was only talking about divinity and aspects of the world that we don’t know about.

I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing

Yes, although I apply this to ego, rather than lifestyle, living in the modern world with all the stuff we have around us, makes that difficult. To be humble, to always approach situations and people with humility kindness and to be unassuming. It is remarkable how these simple things act as a powerhouse in the mystical life. The ego has to be tamed like the ox in Zen is tethered to the post.

I guess I am asking, what does it mean to guide? Phenomenology is not an invitation to think in the abstract, but to see the world "for the first time". What does this mean? is answered in the process of realization. When one is comfortably encountering the world, one is ensconced in the past as it gives familiarity to the present that makes the anticipation of the future secure. Time separates God from us, you could say.

Yes, well apart from the bit about God. This is the bread and butter of mysticism.

We’re getting somewhere;
Developing and embracing humility.
Developing and embracing an unassuming posture.
Clearing the self of all conditioning.
Realising our limited position in the world and the limits of knowledge.
An ability to put to one side all cultural and social narratives.
Communion with nature, or prayer.

All things which ought to be practiced at length before one takes one step.