egodeath | Vertical, Timeless Determinism - In late antiquity, consciousness was
centered around the doctrine and mystic-state experience of the pre-setness of
future thoughts and occurrences. The central thematic concern of religions in
the Hellenistic era was Heimarmene
(Martin 1987), which means fatedness, Necessity, or timeless cosmic
determinism. Modern thought considers some related issues, though only in a
single cognitive state. For example, Philosophical Metaphysics investigates the
related issues of tenseless time, fatedness, agent movement through space and
time, and controller agents (Oaklander & Smith 1995).
The future is unchangeable and pre-set
because of the static relation of control to the time dimension, and because it
is largely an illusion that a person is a continuant agent who exercises power
while moving through time.
Modern science introduces clockwork determinism
and thereby reduces the person to an automaton; in reaction, Copenhagenist
quantum mechanics aims to provide an emancipating alternative to the
hidden-variables determinism of Einstein and Bohm. However, modern conceptions
of determinism and causality are limited to intellectual speculation based in
the ordinary cognitive state, so they habitually tend to envision time as a
sequential flow.
Transcending Determinism Requires Two Jumps - Determinism is both a praised goal and a
disparaged trap to escape, due to determinism-awareness being the intermediate
but not final goal of religious mental transformation. Valentinian Gnosticism
affirmed cosmic determinism but also transcended it, and formulated two
contrasting schemes of thinking about moral culpability (Pagels 1992).
Simplified 2-stage initiation themes
actually reflect a 3-stage progression that is centered around determinism.
Mystic metaphor both endorses and disparages the realization of determinism,
because determinism is only an intermediate destination on the path to salvific
regeneration. The first demon or stage of egoic delusion to be cast out is the
assumption of simple independent self-command and freewill. The second demon to
be overcome is the mental model of cosmic determinism or fatedness, a model
which is rationally coherent but raises the practical problem of control
instability.
19 comments:
By all means, please carry on the discussion of space, time, being, and eternity - just move it over to this post. Thanks!
"IBS appears as a warning to readers of that site, right"
That was the first article I ever read from that site, and I liked some of the points he made about the beginning of space, but I think space is still likely infinite. It seems to me there will always be more space when you get to the place you think space ends. As for "Institute for Bible Studies" or IBS, I'll have to read more to see what they are all about.
lol, I didn't gather that it was the institute for bible studies, I quite genuinely thought it was I.BS - particularly after I read that little thought bubble you linked. That said, you're aware of spacetime curvature, right? and by extension, what that curvature implies about the nature of spacetime itself? (I should say, about our perception of spacetime)
I guess as I was talking about space a separate topic than time. I was more thinking of space itself, going from galaxies to galaxies. I was imagining traveling on and on trying to figure out what it would look like coming to the end of space; what would it look like beyond that, even if it was a wall saying this is the end, what's behind the wall. It seems there would always have to be more. Nothing more deeper than that was my thought.
You probably already have this in your library, As I was reading a little bit about your post you have here, I happened on this, and I thought if fit so well with a couple of the last entries you had here making some nice links for your positions. Please understand this in no way means I agree with the article, but I thought you would maybe enjoy it. It might step on our toes here and there, but not too bad, you should at least find it an interesting perspective.
http://evolutionofconsent.com/?p=591
Pardon me if you already posted it.
Ken, this is what NK had set about trying to draw out a little thus:"Time does not exist." But what is this "time" that doesn't exist? The common-sense understanding ("Time is that which clocks measure: The time is 8 o'clock") is of no help at all.
We need something at least a little better than that, like this:
"Time is the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; an indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another."
Or, maybe this:
"Time is the indefinite continued changing of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole."
Or maybe this:
"Time is a nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future."
Of course, Einstein conclusively showed that "time", whatever else it is, is not an absolute, but a relative, thing; it's value depends on one's particular frame of reference. The relative nature of time is now recognized to be due to time being completely interwoven with space such that the two are totally interdependent on each other. From whence comes the notion of "spacetime".
When we say that "time does not exist", well, what do we mean by "exist"/"existence"? If by "existence" we mean "independent existence", as in, "if X is NOT dependent on anything else (not X) for any part of its nature, then X exists. Otherwise, X does not exist", then time, of course, does not exist, because its nature depends on something else, namely space.
But, if existence is fundamentally interdependent in nature, as in, "only those things which are dependent on something else for their nature exist", then time indeed does exist, but it is a fully interdependent kind of existence, with profound implications on many levels.These are ideas about which we can know, must know something in order to understand the perspective of our religious forbears because the perceptual/psychological/imaginal wall that these ideas constitute are at the core of the mysteries and more specifically for our purposes, the the mystery of faith.
In order to have a fruitful discussion of any of these subjects, we must at least have a common understanding of what the ancients thought and believed and how this informed those beliefs, and, we must have a common understanding informed by the conceptual developments that have emerged since antiquity. It doesn't mean that we have to be technical specialists or scholars in the field, rather, it means we need to have a sound grasp of what those folks far more specifically detail.
I've never seen this before. I read the full article Gnosis, Psychosis, and the Society of the Demiurge and have only a couple of things to say in response. When I was 25 years old, and full to bursting with the novelty of the ideas I had only begun to study in earnest, and, very full of the talent I've always had of comfortably getting up in front of an audience and delivering spellbinding oratory - I considered doing what Will is doing.
Thankfully, I experienced a moment of conscience and realized that while blinding others with facile bullshit might lead to a lucrative minor celebrity of sorts, it would be better in the long run to actually take the time fully explore and master both a productive technical vocation, and, to even more fully explore and master the subjects of my avocational interest - those subjects being the ones about which I liked to talk so much.
Ken's head will explode if he works to understand holography, EPR, and reads up a little bit on Alain Aspect and David Bohm. Hope he doesn't go all new age and redecorate his entire belief system.
Ha!
Mentally I'm moving just barely fast enough -- when I concentrate -- to see the bare outline of exactly why it's spooky. So I couldn't really say.
What's impressive budget cutting today is they've been cutting things like the Centers for Disease Control. Leaving aside how tiny those pickings even are, we no longer have folks in power who can even figure out that they should spend our money on protecting their own families from epidemics.
"These are ideas about which we can know, must know something in order to understand the perspective of our religious forbears because the perceptual/psychological/imaginal wall that these ideas constitute are at the core of the mysteries and more specifically for our purposes, the the mystery of faith."
Let's say we just take as a general overview of time something like this:
http://www.timephysics.com/
How do you feel this gets a closer to deciding if there is an afterlife, or if there is a God or helping in our ability to understand eternity.
I guess my thought comes from something you linked to awhile back, let's see... this one:
http://rainmac.users.sonic.net/darwin/0bookIntro.html
This guy went round and round with the basic theories of why religions still exists, honestly deciding none of the theories could explain religion. He assumed when he started God must be made up or imagined or an idea created by man, and even though could find no explanation, felt no need to wonder about his beginning assumption. The very least he could have done, was to also poke holes in a theory that maybe God does exist and isn't a creation of man, but instead man created by God. But he's pretty certain, even though he can find no other explanation for religion, God exist theory is not worth even considering.
I am betting Gerald Edelman has concepts about time and eternity and space that would be considered extensive enough here to be to have what would be considered a fruitful discussion here.
http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/frameset.php?pageid=http%3A//www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/240411.php Holographic Universe
Since travelling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Alain Aspect’s findings. It has also inspired others to offer even more radical explanations including that of the holographic universe! The implications of a holographic universe are truly mind boggling… Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. To understand why a number of physicists including David Bohm made this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms.
Hologram
A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern -- the area where the two laser beams superimpose -- is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears!
No Sub-Parts
The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half is still found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film is always found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole!
Whole In Every Part
The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has laboured under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart some thing constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.
I think you are getting just as excited as heathens got about the guy who said this: The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. Look at how Paul did it here:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%2017:16-34&version=NKJV
I can't point you to where anyone considers eternity as another dimension inside of time. If the way you've framed this "question" is any indication of where you're at conceptually with the effort to grasp even a little part of what this is about, I can only advise you to put down the google and walk away from the computer. One would have thought that with the abundant links and sources compiled by Mr. Hoffman at egodeath, you'd be just a little bit less lost.
That said, consideration of the more sophisticated Pythagorean and Buddhist conceptions of time and eternity should begin with the teachings attributed to each concerning causality and metempsychosis or what is popularly referred to as reincarnation, though recurrence/eternal recurrence would probably be a bit less misleading.
"If the way you've framed this "question" is any indication of where you're at conceptually with the effort to grasp even a little part of what this is about, I can only advise you to put down the google and walk away from the computer."
I actually phrased it pretty close to how Mr. Hoffman phrased it.
"We use this word without understanding its true meaning We take " eternity " to be an infinite extension of time, while really " eternity " means another dimension of time"
This would put eternity inside of time, wouldn't it?
It actually is what we set out to define and finally here comes the definition of eternity that points to where my mistakes have been in my understanding and you want to shy away from closing the deal on what you consider the proper understanding of eternity. From the last thread continued here you said:
"The concept of "eternal life", your concept of "eternal life" is based on a naive misconception of Time. By extension from the misunderstanding of the nature of Time, proceeds the incomprehension of Eternity."
So here I am madly googling at your feet of this new knowledge (at least for me) ready to replace all words speaking of everlasting or eternity in the Bible with "a different time dimension" or variation of the thought, and replace eternal describing the nouns with "from this different time dimension". But I first wanted to seal the deal that ancients used the term eternal and eternity the same way as defined here as you said we should:
"In order to have a fruitful discussion of any of these subjects, we must at least have a common understanding of what the ancients thought and believed and how this informed those beliefs, and, we must have a common understanding informed by the conceptual developments that have emerged since antiquity. It doesn't mean that we have to be technical specialists or scholars in the field, rather, it means we need to have a sound grasp of what those folks far more specifically detail."
And so you provide two ancients you consider to have proper understanding and strong influence that would shape the use and definition of the word eternal. The problem is I only find Buddha not agreeing with eternal souls or an eternal God, but did seem to understand the term in the same manner as Mr. Hoffman says it is traditionally understood, which was that eternal is infinite time or time can't count it. Mr. Hoffman understood it's how we think of eternity, why else would he feel the need to redefine it?
"We use this word without understanding its true meaning We take " eternity" to be an infinite extension of time, while really " eternity " means another dimension of time"
This would put eternity inside of time, wouldn't it?
No Ken. Exactly the opposite - that would put "eternity" outside of time, kind of sort of for the same reason we must put "time" outside of our three dimensional space. A couple of primers might help to clarify; http://youtu.be/8iCkbOuBr_k
http://youtu.be/fOuXtONDAN0
But I first wanted to seal the deal that ancients used the term eternal and eternity the same way as defined here as you said we should:
Hoffman provides ample evidence in support of his thesis. Perhaps a good starting point for you would be to examine his thesis and supporting evidence and take any questions you have for him directly to the source. http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/egodeath/conversations/topics
The problem is I only find Buddha not agreeing with eternal souls or an eternal God
Your main problem at this juncture is that at your current extremely superficial level of engagement, you honest-to-god don't know shit from shinola about the Buddha, http://youtu.be/wK8vsdbVQ0o?t=2m12s what he believed and was most likely taught, and yet you're already striking your buybull "studies" pose.
Let's save one another a great deal of time and aggravation, shall we?
You take the time to carefully read and try to understand some of the mountain of information you've been presented with, and I'll help you with any question you may have which demonstrates at least a modicum of sincere effort on your part.
I realize that's asking for a whole lot from somebody closely identified with the minimal effort, high dopamine-yield sport of buybull debate, but anything worth understanding is going to take some effort and may not yield the preachers of LA mancave kicks that make me classify buybull debate with Pokemon or armchair quarterback rehashing of the Chiefs vs. the Raiders yesterday.....,
Thanks for the vidoes, believe you posted the flatliner probably 3 or 4 years ago, and this is of course what those who have been blessed to elevate to the fourth dimension use to explain to us who have been down here in the third dimension what it's like to be awakened to the fourth dimension, it's as expansive as if you were to be a 2d being enlightened to 3d. I get that part, and the same illustration is all over the web as the only real way to have unenlightened 3ders understand.
What is interesting to me is 3d has a lot more ways to intersect with 4d than 3 d has to intersect with 2d, yet those elevated to 4d have not been able to give a picture as to how this intersection looks.
OK, I'm back from several days of work. From the other thread, ken said:
From a perspective of one who believes without God there was nothing,
would your definitions here mean that when we say time doesn't exist
because it's nurture depends on something else be used for anything that
God sustains (from a perspective of one who believes in a Creator)? So
if you are going to discuss it like that and want a common understanding
the definition of existence it seems wouldn't be distinguishable
enough.
Well, I would say that the common understanding of existence is simply this: the state of having objective reality. That is, X "exists" if X is able to have continued being independent of anything that is not X. If that is not the case, if X requires not X to have continued being, then X doesn't really "exist", because it's not independent.
The important question here is whether the common understanding of existence is actually correct. It's actually not correct, I think. Existence is fundamentally one of dependence, not independence. So, with respect to time, time does exist, but not because it's an independent entity (as Newton believed). Time exists *because* it depends on space for its continued being (and interestingly, space exists *because* it depends on time for its continued being). Time and space exist because they are in a mutually dependent, or interdependent, relationship.
The same goes for everything else that exists, including divine beings. If God exists and sustains everything, then "everything" also sustains God. Neither can exist independently of the other. Everything arises in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions; nothing exists as a singular, independent entity. There is no "Uncreated Creator" or "Unmoved Mover".
Post a Comment