People worry they are not properly understanding Hegel and so give up reading him. But they should instead be confident that your interpretation of Hegel is one out if many valid interpretations all of which were intended in some way by Hegel when he wrote them.

It's largely intellectuals that change history. Hegel influenced a lot of people

God did make our world from the Genesis one. Have you forgotten about the Fall and how Paul says the world groans until redemption?

The first verse of the Bible says God created the heavens and earth. Are you saying that this was another dimension (odd) or that God used something to create with?

A point and any geometric extension are completely dissimilar from each other. It is strange that there is no thing in-between them. A point goes from itself into segments that have as many points as as any 3D object. There is something unintuitive about this and seems to resemble something from nothing

If Buddhism is metaphysical, maybe it can be classified as absurdism. Accepting contradiction as paradox changes how the mind thinks

Maybe the goal is to have maximal vitality of mind, which experiences helps nurture. Emotionalized rationality keeps us always moving forward. One drawback of Buddhism *seems* to be that the excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya. Buddhist say they want to extinguish desire, but perhaps this is yet another paradox. Mustn't we desire to extinguish?

You said that attachment to the world is illusion yet you want us to take the world as it is presented to us. Is this not a paradox?

Buddhist seem to think like I, the world being being and Nothingness, a yin and yang of opposites. For how can an untainted God sustain the being of what is ugly and offensive to all rational creatures? How can courage to expressed by a God that already has it all thanks to what he just is? How can he brag to Job? How can he live and sustain a child's cancer, asking it to accept the pain because when it gains the power of reason it can learn from the pain. And a pain this God knows nothing of first hand. None of this sounds right

You mention God several times and do you use to to refer to a being undisclosed? Humanity lives in time even if its spirit does not. I have several objections to a being who is father if humanity in the divine sense. This being, according to classical logic, will have never suffered like its sons, loves necessarily and yet somehow (?) freely, and is the active cuase and lives within every crime, ugliness, and humiliation thar there has ever been. Something about the idea seems absurd to me and I genuinely doubt it exists

Do we start with the discrete and then divide it, or are the divisible parts already there?? Continuity and discretenes seem to assume each other. Trying to put one first leads to infinite regress

I too wonder how a continuum makes up something discrete

With regard to a segment, are you saying this segment is determinate in that it is finite and indeterminate in that it has infinite points in it?

Maybe mathematical infinities only make sense in relation to the metaphysically infinite

It sounds to me as if you agree with Schopenhauer over Hegel. Is the world pure will, irrational and free. Or is the world pure reason wherein new truths build on old one in a structure. In medieval times, they had this same debate between Thomists and Scotians and I'm assuming Buddhism tends more towards will

I agree with what you write.

The world is presented to us and it is as we subjectively present it to ourselves. If we say H2O, what kind of knowledge has come forth? We know abstractly that we can put "this" with "that" and get something to drink. But even when we know what something tastes, looks, feels, and smells like, this doesn't give us knowledge beyond the senses

To be trapped without mysticism is unphilosophical. We are the unconscious and speech, Father and Son. We are totally the Logos and the Father and Son are One, and nothing at the same time. I think we need the side of Nothingness to know how we are in the divine. If God is pure substance we could never become one in it, because we are "thrown" (Heidegger). Within the finite, the mind corrects speech and speech corrects the mind. The former is very Buddhist but there comes a point when you can't control anymore, so you turn to speech to correct the mind. And Buddhist preach right speech. There is dialectic in use and it follows its own logic. We are spoken so that the unseen is seen

The reason I mention being and nothing is that only the insane would deny they experience being (and the insane are detached from that) but if one can answer "nothing!" to all questions of being *nonetheless*, this would be Buddhist. People without a mystical side won't understand this, but look at it this way: dependent origination means everything is connected as one without a foundation (because it is nothing), an infinite series. As Aristotle said, an infinite series needs an essential first cause. This is true philosophically unless WE are the first cause and everything, even us, are nothing. God is in all our eyes

It may be faulty metaphysics but it's still logic, unless you're going to say no faulty metaphysics is logical

Buddhism says that "that" is just illusion because we are all everything which is nothing. To traditional Western philosophy that is nihilism but many modern philosophers would disagree. Hegel says we are being and nothingness at the same time

From your OP let me say I don't think God could change its nature but the question arises why injustice and suffering is necessary for us when they are not necessary for the God this world comes from and which is the archetype of everything

Hegel only rejected the law on non-contradiction because he thought all contradictions were paradoxes in nature and that contradiction was an empty term. He went for the big fish, trying to unite all human thought in a system that still maintained the reality of truth. The East has dependent origination (interdependent coarising) and if all is one then truth is interdependent. That happens to be what Hegel thought as well!

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is" Albert Camus

I think a lot of Hegel's arguments do have 3 parts

I doubt anyone can find happiness without a good understanding of themselves. The process may never end

Faith is believing in something, which appears out of the range of thought, for the sake of the good the intuition seems to sense in it. I assume Buddhism has much of this. I was wrong to equate Nirvana with Heaven because Heaven has resurrected bodies and God, neither if which are in Nirvana. Anf the goal in the West seems much more specific such that you can have palpable faith in it. But meditation is not a rational process but an intuitive one, so I don't think belief/faith in contrary to the Buddhist religion. Isn't belief part of all religions because it goes beyond the world of sense? Some say all thought begins and ends in faith. Reason is in the middle

That sounds gnostic, as if the physical self is reincarnated bodies while this false self has not awaken to its true relation to reality

It seems to me that Nirvana or Heaven (either word) would be a state of great mental activity

I think that Buddhism might be a system of antimonies. Is it that we cannot be everything without being nothing? But how can we be one with the world while feeling like nothing on the other hand (anatman)? And where does Western objectivity and correspondence theory fit in with this. The 4 Noble Truths are supposedly TRUTHS, and yet the two truths doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine#:~:text=The%20Buddhist%20doctrine%20of%20the,ultimate%22%20(param%C4%81rtha)%20truth.)? Some truths change in life and yet there seems to be an ultimate (absolute). If all truths collapse into each other, it is turtles all the way down and where is resting in Nirvana at that point?Dependent origination tends to conflict with ultimate truth. Or am I thinking like a Westerner still? Breathing with concentration seems to be to physical like picking up a weight? The mind, however, is spiritual and I feel like thinking itself is spiritual. I'm struggling to understand what happens when thoughts cease

Everything changes and therefore everything is empty. — praxis

Is Nirvana empty and does it change?

What is meant by "self". As in, what are the limits of the self? Is it the physical body? Because if not, if the self is as fundamental as the energy and matter that makes up one's self as we exist in human form, then self extends to all matter and energy in the universe. In essence, in this case self is equivalent to the universe. — Benj96

I see self as identity, as identity as personhood. The personhood is spread out through the the body. And separation of bodies is part of scientific theory, right? How can you have physical causality without at least 2 objects? Are you saying we are part of the world physically or spiritually?

Jeeez, ya blokes from daunundda are lazy:

Meditation has been associated with relatively reduced activity in the default mode network, a brain network implicated in self-related thinking and mind wandering. However, previous imaging studies have typically compared meditation to rest despite other studies reporting differences in brain activation patterns between meditators and controls at rest. Moreover, rest is associated with a range of brain activation patterns across individuals that has only recently begun to be better characterized. Therefore, this study compared meditation to another active cognitive task, both to replicate findings that meditation is associated with relatively reduced default mode network activity, and to extend these findings by testing whether default mode activity was reduced during meditation beyond the typical reductions observed during effortful tasks. In addition, prior studies have used small groups, whereas the current study tested these hypotheses in a larger group. Results indicate that meditation is associated with reduced activations in the default mode network relative to an active task in meditators compared to controls. Regions of the default mode showing a group by task interaction include the posterior cingulate/precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex. These findings replicate and extend prior work indicating that suppression of default mode processing may represent a central neural process in long-term meditation, and suggest that meditation leads to relatively reduced default mode processing beyond that observed during another active cognitive task.

Full article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529365/ — praxis

Is this called qietism in the West? The dichonomy between resting and acting (internally) is not clear to me

Taking responsibility is not the business of the so called so-self. the logic goes more like this: If there is no self, then there is no one to take responsibility. The act of taking responsibility can be understood as the illusory self, which is a construct (a personality constituted by language and cultural institutions), which is a necessary condition for the self effacing finality of nirvana. — Constance

Are you saying we accept responsibility before we abdicate ourselves?

Wittgensteinian objection that logic cannot be known, for this would require logic to make it so. — Constance

That's a neat logical trick. Interesting, it's like a supertask. And yet can one escape the mind in Buddhism? Appeals to intuition seems to me to be appeals to faith

Derrida is in the background on this issue. If there is anyone who makes this case, it is Derrida. See his Structures, Signs and Play (and certainly Not his "Difference" which will simply irritate. Think of illusion as, not simply words as tags on things; rather, it is experience, the past/present/future construction is the very foundation of the world. No wonder serious meditation is so hard to achieve. Daunting at best, for one is not just trying to calm the mind. One is quite literally attempting to erase/nullify/annihilate the world. — Constance

I do need to read one of his books. When I do i'll start with that one. It was my point that emptiness means not nonexistence, but the opposite, that there would be a world as it is, without additions from the mind. Maya would be what we place outside ourselves from within. The Buddhism don't seem to have a Western concept of subject and object like we do (somehow)

I also wanted to add that it everything is perception, that everything we see is alive, being in the mind as it is. Sounds and sights would be as alive as your mind. That makes me see the world a little differently

Why do we always have to know what is objectively right and why would God necessarily have to will ubiquitous clarity?

I recently read the "proofs" Lectures and am now into the Davos book

Yes:

"The first thing to be considered in the sphere of the revelatory religion is the abstract concept of God; the basis is the free, pure, revelatory concept. God's manifestation, God's being for an other, is God's determinate [ontological] being or existence [Dasein], and the soil of God's determinate being is finite spirit."
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1831)

To reveal is to allow truth to be seen. He uses subjective terms ("negative", "movement", "ideal", ect) and yet structures his Objective Logic against his Subjective Logic in a war in which the former wins out, resulting in the picture of concrete, universal, Platonic reality. One of his followers (sic), Heidegger, helped clear up how history and philosophy sublate each other in dialectical combat:

"In his 1925 Kassel lectures on Dilthey, Heidegger argued even more strenuously that 'the struggle for an historical worldview' could not be left to historical study but required a genuinely philosophical confrontation with Daisen's sense of itself as a historical being." Continental Divide written by Peter Gordan pg 178-179

In 1911 Husserl wrote his essay "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" in response to the historicism of writers such as Wilhelm Dilthey. It is true that Hegel shared a *kind* of historicism with Herder yet it is quite clear he had an ontology that was far more objective than subjective. See Hegel's final "Lectures on the Proofs for the Existence of God" published by Oxford University Press... Hegel was a forerunner to modern phenomenology, not cultural relativism, if read correctly

Lots of good posts! Reason for me is the ability to grasp an idea with the necessary means of consciousness. We strive for the idea among a complex of thoughts and feel we have the truth when our minds rest. If AI can do complex thoughts it's possible it does so by another means then by way of consciousness.

It could just be that I do not know how to do those things. That is, I have the ability, I just do not know how to exercise it. — Bartricks

Yes that might be true

But as I have argued before, being in possession of all knowledge is consistent with being ignorant of any number of truths. For knowledge involves justified true belief, and so an omniscient person is in possession of all justified true beliefs. But that does not mean they are in possession of all truths - or at least, it does not necessarily entail that - for it could be that there are true beliefs that are not justified. And in fact, if I am God then I will be the arbiter of justifications. But what that means is that those true beliefs of mine that I approve of myself believing will be the sum total of knowledge at that time. And thus eve — Bartricks

This is reminiscent of my personal thought that I shouldn't be bothered with things I don't know. There is no evidence there is a problem of something contradicting my knowledge until I discover a problem myself. This gives me certainty about my beliefs. But I know there is more knowledge to be gained

What about omnibenevolence? Can I be absolutely certain that I am not morally perfect? Well, as with knowledge, if I am omnipotent then I will be the arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad. That is, my own attitudes towards things will constitutively determine what is right, wrong, good and bad. And assuming that whatever I do on any particular occasion is something I approve of myself doing - at least at that very moment - then everything I do will be right. And if I disapprove of some character trait, then I nevertheless approve of myself disapproving of it, and so it seems that if I am omnipotent, then I will be morally perfect as well. — Bartricks

Well I think this paragraphed shows you are off the true path. We have moral obligations which we bind ourselves to but the "we" who binds them is God. God is the source of it all but your identity is not God. You lose your identity if you follow the right path and become One again. But as long as you are you you must do what is correct otherwise you will never find yourself at home with yourself again

I fail to see a logical progression in your threads

Whether a rock stays the same through change doesn't matter much as far as our lives go. Maybe the rock melts into some universal form every 7 minutes. Who's to say. But what about this "who"? If personal identity with regard to moral actions is empty than we have no personal responsibility anymore. Subjectivism tries to avoid relativism self refutation by saying objectivity doesn't exist. But that is an objective claim made towards a philosophical idea. You seem then to promote dogmatic nihilism in the end because you have to still say "my position is true". There is no getting out of that

If someone is evil, he can be sure about that even if he tries to hide it from himself. Sartre on bad faith

An absolute truth is a thought that accords with reality. I guess a solipsist wouldn't have truth, but if there is more than oneself, truth is when you know something about it. I guess it's also true that truth about yourself, even if you are sovereign, and all alone, is possible in that the thought would accurately understand the self, instead of having a delusion of some sort