What Am I?

[otherbrother]

I really liked what you said about the right brain and it apparent role in spirituality. A left brain that honors its partner seems to go a long ways toward moving us along the path to enlightenment .
And the good old (actually new, newest to evolve) prefrontal cortex facilitates such (as you say) balance.

 

[talib-al-kalim]

I would like to pose a philosophical question to everyone.
If I do not believe in external deities, but I do believe in my GodSelf (i.e. Higher Self/Psyche/Soul) as the one and only God that we can ever come to know.

Do you consider me a Theist or an Atheist?

In my eyes, your belief in your GodSelf has little in common with a monotheistic or polytheistic belief. In fact, all other religions have an inner and an outer dimension, and a practice to harmonise the inside with the outside. Monotheistic belief is that there is One Spirit, God, Who is in and over all.
Indian polytheism discern various principles/deities/manifestations, which are however related, together making a whole.

Various religions discern a spiritual and a material entity, both comprising all spiritual resp. all material, having both related.

Atheist Monism assumes that all is related, but there is no Actor over all.
Central/Southern African Spiritism assigns a spirit to every individual (human, tree...) and community (people, forest...) and aims at a good relation and harmony between all.

Buddhism knows exercises on an individual level, but it has also a strong social component; the inner path shall finally lead back to society and have its fruit there.

There are monotheists, polytheists, agnostics, atheists. But all have a dimension that exceeds oneself, a kind of transcendent harmony, following an ideal of transcendental oneness.

I don't see that your path leads there. I don't see any significance in the question whether you are a theist or an atheist.

 

[otherbrother]

Talib-al-kalim,
Regarding this you said “There are monotheists, polytheists, agnostics, atheists. But all have a dimension that exceeds oneself, a kind of transcendent harmony, following an ideal of transcendental oneness.”

I had the blessing of attending a dance drama based on Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland. I never read the book or watched the movie, but my uninformed eyes saw an integration of disparate aspects of a self during a dream (right brain) state acting like a computer defragging process.
Then I thought of TS Eliot’s poem The Straw Men. Then I thought of the Luck brothers (name altered, but actual friends of my family).
What, I wildly speculated, do they have in common? Enough affluence to explore the rich nonessentials of life. Freedom to tap dance on the higher floors of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Both of the Luck brothers were raised in a relatively wealthy materialistic culture, and each departed from their parents’ modern expectations of suburban success (big pink houses). They both discovered their right brains. One, the youngest brother, went from being an engineer to a near-monk, all about spiritual richness. The other fell headlong in into music. Both totally more-or-less wasted the expensive college education their upwardly aspiring parents paid for. Especially in the case of the younger brother’s path.
Both my wife and I mourned the fact that the play was seen by mostly, if not exclusively, upper middle class viewers. Shouldn’t poor inner city kids be seeing the same wonderful wonderland drama culminating in the wayward Prodigal Son-like dreamy right brain eventually gracing his left brain dominant father-self with increased integration and self harmony? To soak in the impression of loving wholeness? To have a chance for it to rub off on them in a way that enriches them and far exceeds their external poverty!
Yes, the path of human growth you seem to be emphasizing as being the main point of the discussion about self and god, a point that makes the distinction between the two fairly irrelevant.
Love (that quantum coherence thing we do),
Darrell (otherbrother)

 

['Amir Alzzalam]

In my eyes, your belief in your GodSelf has little in common with a monotheistic or polytheistic belief. In fact, all other religions have an inner and an outer dimension, and a practice to harmonise the inside with the outside. Monotheistic belief is that there is One Spirit, God, Who is in and over all.
Indian polytheism discern various principles/deities/manifestations, which are however related, together making a whole.

Various religions discern a spiritual and a material entity, both comprising all spiritual resp. all material, having both related.

Atheist Monism assumes that all is related, but there is no Actor over all.
Central/Southern African Spiritism assigns a spirit to every individual (human, tree...) and community (people, forest...) and aims at a good relation and harmony between all.

Buddhism knows exercises on an individual level, but it has also a strong social component; the inner path shall finally lead back to society and have its fruit there.

There are monotheists, polytheists, agnostics, atheists. But all have a dimension that exceeds oneself, a kind of transcendent harmony, following an ideal of transcendental oneness.

I don't see that your path leads there. I don't see any significance in the question whether you are a theist or an atheist.

I don't see any significance in the question whether you are a theist or an atheist.

Everything you mentioned is Theistic, the question's significance lies in whether you consider my Beliefs to be Theistic or Not (Atheistic), not what form of Theism.

I'll rephrase it . . . I don't believe in gods, devils, angels, or demons in the way other theistic faiths do. I believe in a lesser self (this being) and a Greater Self (my Psyche, Soul, Isolate Consciousness, a.k.a. GodSelf).

Furthermore, I believe the God(s) other Belief systems venerate are misconstrued versions of our Greater Self as people have difficulty accepting their full potential or their shortcomings, hence their need for someone to give credit (God) and someone to blame (Devil).

 

[talib-al-kalim]

Everything you mentioned is Theistic,

There's of course my own monotheistic faith behind it, but I also mentioned atheist, agnostic and spiritualist concepts.

the question's significance lies in whether you consider my Beliefs to be Theistic or Not (Atheistic), not what form of Theism.

If you want, I consider you atheist because you are no god.

I'll rephrase it . . . I don't believe in gods, devils, angels, or demons in the way other theistic faiths do. I believe in a lesser self (this being) and a Greater Self (my Psyche, Soul, Isolate Consciousness, a.k.a. GodSelf).

That Isolate Consciousness is nothing positive in my concept of a sense of life.

Furthermore, I believe the God(s) other Belief systems venerate are misconstrued versions of our Greater Self as people have difficulty accepting their full potential or their shortcomings, hence their need for someone to give credit (God) and someone to blame (Devil).

It's good to recognise ourselves. But I don't see any sense in a full potential unless it is seen in respect to what is around us, near or far.

 

[wil]

Wotta thread!

(Welcome otherbrother...boy did you dive in! Drop a line in our intro thread and say hello!)

I have in the past refereed.to myself as a nontheistic panentheist... as I, as you @Amir do not believe in the god as presented in scriptures

 

[otherbrother]

“I'll rephrase it . . . I don't believe in gods, devils, angels, or demons in the way other theistic faiths do. I believe in a lesser self (this being) and a Greater Self (my Psyche, Soul, Isolate Consciousness, a.k.a. GodSelf). “

Our notion of separate anything is from our habit of what I call “thinking like matter”, in which discrete, separate, objects generally appear, with what Whitehead (I think) called “simple location.” But energy fields have a kind of not-so-simple location or translocation quality. If we override the default program of thinking like matter, and start to “think like energy,” or even “think like Mind” (Moody Blues: “Thinking is the best way to travel.”), then separation doesn’t seem to compute. The right brain hemisphere thinks in fuzzier, overlapping, and even ,at times, juxtapositioning ways that seem to be “thinking like energy.” “Spiritual “ concepts may have involved thinking like energy long before the concept of energy was formed. Spirits were thought to fly about in much the same way that invisible electromagnetic signals fly through the air to make pictures in faraway boxes (TVs) or sounds in faraway boxes (radios). The logic of such energy is different than the way we think of a reality composed of physical things.
Love,
Darrell (otherbrother)

 

[wil]

I don't believe in gods, devils, angels, or demons in the way other theistic faiths do.

I believe they are parts of our psyche ...the choices we make are governed by our thoughts, experiences, knowledge and understanding of it all.

All of these inputs to any decision are not always clear, not black and white, right and wrong, moral and amoral...so these archetypes we deem acceptable to us discuss the point in question. (I would like to say not unlike here where we have collectively decided to allow external (or is it) contemplation to take place within our field of vision)

I don't think the cartoon animators with a little red horned devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other are a far cry from reality.

I also see many of the authors of Biblical allegory as adept describing the arguments in our mind to assist us in earthly decisions extremely valuable.

 

['Amir Alzzalam]

Everything you mentioned is Theistic, the question's significance lies in whether you consider my Beliefs to be Theistic or Not (Atheistic), not what form of Theism.

I'll rephrase it . . . I don't believe in gods, devils, angels, or demons in the way other theistic faiths do. I believe in a lesser self (this being) and a Greater Self (my Psyche, Soul, Isolate Consciousness, a.k.a. GodSelf).

Furthermore, I believe the God(s) other Belief systems venerate are misconstrued versions of our Greater Self as people have difficulty accepting their full potential or their shortcomings, hence their need for someone to give credit (God) and someone to blame (Devil).

 

[otherbrother]

Nudist?

We need a looser grip kind of humor about stuff like this that, truth be told, we’re just making up as we go along. That’s why I also like the direction this thread takes later on, about focusing more on the HOW (to be more spiritual, whole, healthy, efficacious) more than the what. FUNCTION over form.

 

[otherbrother]

I believe they are parts of our psyche ...the choices we make are governed by our thoughts, experiences, knowledge and understanding of it all.

All of these inputs to any decision are not always clear, not black and white, right and wrong, moral and amoral...so these archetypes we deem acceptable to us discuss the point in question. (I would like to say not unlike here where we have collectively decided to allow external (or is it) contemplation to take place within our field of vision)

I don't think the cartoon animators with a little red horned devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other are a far cry from reality.

I also see many of the authors of Biblical allegory as adept describing the arguments in our mind to assist us in earthly decisions extremely valuable.

I totally agree with your view. Different functions that, even in our dreams, we personify in order to relate to better.
I had two (synchronistic?) experiences recently that highlighted this function-over-form insight:
1. Got to see a dance drama about Alice in Wonderland. By end of play I (who had not read or seen Alice in Wonderland book/movie/play before) could easily see and sense a personality’s disparate parts becoming integrated as the Queen of Hearts shifted from hardened to soft love. In quantum-speak, more “coherent.”
2. Ha ha! Now I can’t remember the second! Just goes to show how the observer effect involving a kind of left brain identifying of “things” as we unpack a more wave-like mental impression can cause wave collapse of the mental association/memory/impression. In an anger management class I facilitated in prison as a psychology service provider, I similarly lost what I was getting ready to say next. I spontaneously blurted out “man overboard.”
Inmates would playfully shout out across the prison yard as they saw me later, “man overboard.”!!!!!
Also shows the costs of differentiation. A degree of incoherence as the multiple “dance partners” accidentally step on each other’s “toes.” The left and right brains sometimes get in each other’s ways, even though it is potentially a marriage made in (from?) heaven.

 

[otherbrother]

Now I remember! :
My wife and I rented the movie Contact, to reexperience after all these years.
In the movie, the advanced beings communicated with Jodie Foster’s character by appearing as her deceased father. The thing/being of her father was representing a function of love that the spiritual-like beings were patiently planning to facilitate in civilizations throughout the universe.
The implication is that a function of increased integration of the Universe’s parts is gradually working through our pursuit of “truth”, whether by scientific means (Wilber’s upper right “quadrant”) or experiential/subjective means (Wilber’s upper left quadrant).
In a way our individual “being” is more a function than a form, more the verb sense of “being” than the noun sense. Or should I say the nonsense of the noun sense of being!!!
We are each a God thought, a projection of Mind, with the potential to help Mind reclaim the various projections, the “ten thousand things” that the Taoists speak of.

 

[otherbrother]

There's of course my own monotheistic faith behind it, but I also mentioned atheist, agnostic and spiritualist concepts.

If you want, I consider you atheist because you are no god.

That Isolate Consciousness is nothing positive in my concept of a sense of life.

It's good to recognise ourselves. But I don't see any sense in a full potential unless it is seen in respect to what is around us, near or far.

Can I offer a thought-form, metaphysical notion, that gets both you more or less on the same page, potentially shows a “common ground?” :
Overall reality may be like that “fountain flowing deep and wide” that is mentioned in traditional Christian writings, but never got much serious consideration. In other words, overall reality has a depth dimension. Furthermore, the ways of the deep part of the Fountain are different than the ways of the outer surface of it. The deep zones are probably much more convergent, interactive, overlapping—composed of some”thing” more like functions than material things, perhaps like specific frequencies capable of harmonizing.
From the Deepest zone of either a “self” or of “reality”, everything actually or potentially weaves together much more than things on the surface where we live physical lives.
From the viewpoint of normal identification of “self,” the Deep is an other, a separate deity.
But from the deepest zones of “self,” it is an integral part, not an “other.”
My contention is that you are both geniuses touching different parts of the overall reality “elephant.”

 

[EricPH]

During a training cycle for a marathon,

I found a deeper understanding of One God; from a marathon event I did.

I had about three months training to do a 1200k cycle ride on a single speed, fixed wheel bike. The ride took just under 85 hours, and I had to pedal every inch of the way, meaning, I had to turn the pedals about 225,000 times. There was no freewheeling downhill, there was no choice of gears going up and down hill. If I wanted to go forward, I had a choice of one.

My understanding of God is, he created all that is seen and unseen. If you are a theist, can you worship any other kind of God?

 

[otherbrother]

I totally agree with your view. Different functions that, even in our dreams, we personify in order to relate to better.
I had two (synchronistic?) experiences recently that highlighted this function-over-form insight:
1. Got to see a dance drama about Alice in Wonderland. By end of play I (who had not read or seen Alice in Wonderland book/movie/play before) could easily see and sense a personality’s disparate parts becoming integrated as the Queen of Hearts shifted from hardened to soft love. In quantum-speak, more “coherent.”
2. Ha ha! Now I can’t remember the second! Just goes to show how the observer effect involving a kind of left brain identifying of “things” as we unpack a more wave-like mental impression can cause wave collapse of the mental association/memory/impression. In an anger management class I facilitated in prison as a psychology service provider, I similarly lost what I was getting ready to say next. I spontaneously blurted out “man overboard.”
Inmates would playfully shout out across the prison yard as they saw me later, “man overboard.”!!!!!
Also shows the costs of differentiation. A degree of incoherence as the multiple “dance partners” accidentally step on each other’s “toes.” The left and right brains sometimes get in each other’s ways, even though it is potentially a marriage made in (from?) heaven.

One point of possible disagreement however is that we may not assume that everything stays within an individual psyche. At the deepest levels of being and reality, Kant’s apriori , mental filter, given, of an inside vs an outside might disappear. In the Moody Blues’ song House of Four Doors, the narrator finds himself outside after going inside. This may have been an artistic expression of a truth that our minds have trouble wrapping itself around. Möbius (so?) strip also comes to this (my loose) mind.

 

[otherbrother]

I found a deeper understanding of One God; from a marathon event I did.

I had about three months training to do a 1200k cycle ride on a single speed, fixed wheel bike. The ride took just under 85 hours, and I had to pedal every inch of the way, meaning, I had to turn the pedals about 225,000 times. There was no freewheeling downhill, there was no choice of gears going up and down hill. If I wanted to go forward, I had a choice of one.

My understanding of God is, he created all that is seen and unseen. If you are a theist, can you worship any other kind of God?

Yes the old saying about reaching in deep during an athletic event seems literally true during endurance events. I agree with the quantum physicists that there is a real (“ontological”) substrate of reality. I think the suffering prompts us to literally go deep to a zone of inner potentiality, and that that zone is a kind of, as you say, “oneness.”

 

[otherbrother]

I believe they are parts of our psyche ...the choices we make are governed by our thoughts, experiences, knowledge and understanding of it all.

All of these inputs to any decision are not always clear, not black and white, right and wrong, moral and amoral...so these archetypes we deem acceptable to us discuss the point in question. (I would like to say not unlike here where we have collectively decided to allow external (or is it) contemplation to take place within our field of vision)

I don't think the cartoon animators with a little red horned devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other are a far cry from reality.

I also see many of the authors of Biblical allegory as adept describing the arguments in our mind to assist us in earthly decisions extremely valuable.

Wil,
That was the creator of the thread that said I don’t believe…(re separate deities), although I also appreciate his point of view, and, in a way, agree.

 

[otherbrother]

Yes the old saying about reaching in deep during an athletic event seems literally true during endurance events. I agree with the quantum physicists that there is a real (“ontological”) substrate of reality. I think the suffering prompts us to literally go deep to a zone of inner potentiality, and that that zone is a kind of, as you say, “oneness.”

Eric PH,

I been thinkin’:
Maybe there are “Harvesters “ and “Divers”.

The Harvesters get to the oneness via love, which, for most of us at least, requires an “other” which compliments the limits of our individuality. Makes us go beyond our regular-self and helps us feel more whole. Irony, this loved other helps our self feel more vital and whole.
One might assume that Harvesters go to oneness through the (so-called) “heart.”


The Divers get to the oneness primarily by mentally sensing the core of being. Dirties just create distractions and gaps. The Divers go to the oneness through the (so-called) mind.
But once they perceive deeply enough, love happens after the fact.

 

[Thomas]

In a way our individual “being” is more a function than a form, more the verb sense of “being” than the noun sense. Or should I say the nonsense of the noun sense of being!!!

I think that's perhaps a key to the whole caboodle – it's about relations, not about objects – God, creation, etc ... is not a think, and object, an event, its a continuum, a seamless cloth.

We are each a God thought, a projection of Mind, with the potential to help Mind reclaim the various projections, the “ten thousand things” that the Taoists speak of.

Logos theology says much the same: There is Logos, in which resides all the individual logoi – the "ten thousand things".

 

[talib-al-kalim]

Eric PH,

I been thinkin’:
Maybe there are “Harvesters “ and “Divers”.

The Harvesters get to the oneness via love, which, for most of us at least, requires an “other” which compliments the limits of our individuality. Makes us go beyond our regular-self and helps us feel more whole. Irony, this loved other helps our self feel more vital and whole.
One might assume that Harvesters go to oneness through the (so-called) “heart.”


The Divers get to the oneness primarily by mentally sensing the core of being. Dirties just create distractions and gaps. The Divers go to the oneness through the (so-called) mind.
But once they perceive deeply enough, love happens after the fact.

I think, an equilibrium between "diving" and "harvesting" is important.

If you only focus on yourself, you ignore a great part of yourself, which is your impact, your value in the whole. You also ignore the sense of many commandments which concern just this impact, that it be good.

If you only focus outside, on other people, the environment, animals and whatsoever, your source will dry out. You risk to power out and even lose the capacity of doing good outside.

God is inside and outside. Reaching for oneness with God engenders the oneness with both, have God in yourself so that you can, like to, and will do His will.