Feeling of truth and spiritual substance

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As you know, a believer says that what he/she feels is true, that god really exists. There are numerous religions, and all believers, whether they are monotheist, polytheist ou something else, say that they feel a presence.

Some call it Jesus, other Yahweh, Allh, and others Ganesh, in the ancient Greece, Zeus or Venus, etc. But these nouns are just made of sounds, of syllabes, which are very diverse. So, if the presence they say really exist, we can deduce that it does not have a precise noun. Moreover, words are conventionnal to designate things, depend on the language, etc. So there is no noun or particular word which is "the right one". We simply hear one word in some culture and we tend to assciate religous experience with it.

Also, images that represents these gods are also diverse, an elephant, a crucified man, a turtle, a light, a man on a could with thunder, a women that comes out of the leg of another god, etc. Clearly these images are contradictory with each other, and so cannot represent the thing we are talking about. They are cultural, and we are used to see them because they are drawn, or represented by a statue, described with words, etc. So again, we associate religious experience with it.

We can also notice that some people say there are many gods and other say there is only one, and others don't believe in gods but in spirits of nature or spirits of the ancesters. If there was one one presence each time, we could consider that the name "god" could be meaningful, that's what deists do. But the unicity is not obvious. The term god also contains a hierarchy, gods are above angels whereas the word spirit does not mention it. But they all agree to talk about spirituality, of a relation between our spirit and other spirits, and the sensation of a presence. It is similar to the sensation nearby another human, except it can be multiplied, transformed, etc.

So according to believers there could be one or more spirit. If we think about it, there are a three possibilites. Either there is only one and each believer see a part of it, but there should be more coherence between religions. Or this thing has multiple shapes, but the shape seen is the same within a cultural context, so in fact it would be completely cultural. Finally, it is possible that this thing is more like a substance, that can be shaped like plasticine. The shape of the plasticine is not the plasticine itself. So the subject becomes the substance, which can be shaped.

In other word, we can deduce that if this spiritual presence exists, it has no particular shape, like a substance, and this substance would interact with people's minds. So all revealed religions and all religions that say that spiritual beings have a particular shapes are making a mistake by considering a given shape to be the substance. So the sensation of truth about Jesus, to talk about god, to be in fusion with Ganesh, to listen to the spirits of nature, etc. this sensation of truth is an illusion, because these shapes are conventional. So there is no point in preaching a particular "truth".

So, we are left with a substance, felt like a presence, and that we do not hear much about.

What can we say about this substance, if ever it exists ?

Spiritual "substance" is fancy and illusion. Only physical things are real.

ruveyn

Agreed. Belief in such things is usually based on subjective emotions and perceptions, such as when people get caught up in the excitement of a rousing evangelical rally, and associate the euphoria with the presence of the Holy Spirit, and not the fact that they've been hyperventilating (shouting and singing) in the presence of other exited people for hours.


Matter, energy, and the interactive forces between them; in other words, if a thing or its physical effects can not be measured, then it can not be said to exist. For example, The mind is an emergent phenomenon, based on electro-chemical activity in the brain. This activity can be measured and analysed during different mental states. Thus, the mind can be measured and determined to be real.

"Spiritual Substance" is thus a contradiction in terms - an oxymoron.


Fnord

I understand what you say from a physical point of view. But the spiritual experience is not only about hyperventilating and being with people. Personaly, I am an atheist, but I would like to know what we say exactly about this spiritual experience and the spiritual substance, if it exists. I do not mean by that a substance that exists like water, of course.

If you want a scientific image, we can consider that waves exist, but there are only vibration of water. Same goes for the spirit. It does not need to be real in physical terms. If you think about it, photons are waves, all particles are quantic waves. You can of course consider that the spirit is virtual, but that is not satisfactory for our experience. We do not feel that we are experiencing a virtual reality.

I agree that the shape is often mistaken for the substance, but what puzzles me more than anything is that the culturally specific shapes, while very different in many ways, also have a lot of striking commonalities, even across large expanses of time and space. For example, pre-Columbian, pre-Christian Gods, like Quetzachotl and Viracocha, bare a very strong resemblance to the Christ figure from the Old World. One was crucified in the clouds and resurrected, and the other brought morality and culture to the Ancient Peruvians after the great deluge and was hacked to death, floated in a coffin down Lake Titicaca, and resurrected from the dead, much like Osiris. There's no real archaeological explanation as to why these myths should be so similar, but they are. It makes me think that there was, either, more contact between the Old World and New World than is realized, or that there's a unifying collective unconscious as Jung believed.

I also find it fascinating that there's a lot of commonality between the Lady Guadalupe and Maha Kali,

It may be that there are underlying human needs that tend to make these shapes.

Atoms and their interactions make shapes, not wishes and needs.

ruveyn

Presuming a materially-based mind, atoms and their interactions do make wishes and needs.

And yes, there do seem to be common human behaviours. Narrative, metaphor, curiosity etc.

Talk to someone who's more into the theosophic traditions to get a good answer on this.

Essentially the idea is that consciousness is everything. Consciousness begets consciousness, consciousness begets matter. In this way the illusion of reality was instated for the sake of what souls wanted to do over manifold incarnations.

The God that's left as the Totality is not an angry God, really everything in existence is a subset of, is that God in its own aspect. That God has sentience but really wants every soul to mature on its own course, with help as desired but to do so nonetheless by dealing with what it feels, learning by experiences through its incarnations; learning to create, learning to express itself in various ways, understanding cause and effect, action and consequence, etc. etc..

When people of that persuasion speak of Christ consciousness they're speaking of Jesus as the local stem from which the billions of earth souls incarnate to day and all before it well from (add in local aliens races as well - Arcturians, Pleiadians/Pejarans, etc. etc.). The need to get to the Father through him from that standpoint is anatomical rather than a need to buy a specific dogma or organized doctrine.

@techstepgenr8tion:

How I understand this from a materialist point of view, is the mind produces subjectivity, which contains a virtual world with matter, needs, beliefs, Jesus-Christ, Allah, Ganesh and so on.

So this spiritual substance is in a way the result of neuronal activity. So the physical world creates neurons which create subjectivity which creates a virtual world with matter and soul.

The spiritualist point of view is twisting the causal chain, by saying that the mind creates the subjectivity which creates a virtual world which creates the real world.

You're missing what directly confronts materialism though. Its a statement that consciousness was before all else and created matter. Its not a concept of creating neurons or simply an internal human reality or societal reality out of what's self-acknowledged whole cloth fiction for catharsis or societal blueprinting. Its more a claim that things like you'd witness in the observer effect (double-slit experiment), PEAR's studies, or the random number generators during major events, show the effects of certain aspects in consciousness already causing noticeable fluctuations in what's already there. Its a claim that consciousness itself comes from one and is fanned out like a candelabra, much like you'd think of genetic ancestry, just that the stems are as consciousness as the leaves and tips. The whole tree would be the Totality, the tips would be ground level beings like ourselves or even just ground level beings in spirit, and the branches between the trunk and the tips would be local regents behind those points of consciousness - like the claim that Jesus is a branch or regress point for our world or at least much of our world. It works because unlike a genetic tree not only does nothing inherently die but also the further any branch or tributary ingresses on itself it actually can examine all the way back through the branch and the trunk - if it could comprehend what it saw.

I think this guy, Amit Gowswami says it well albeit there are a few corners - like the inability to do anything from the ego - that I'd take with a grain of salt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJoUl597HrY

So no, its not partial tail-wag-the-dog from a materialist perspective, its whole tail-wag-the-dog.

It would be somewhat like the Matrix. Well I think there are too much gaps here, because how could there be a continuity of reality if it appears only when there is an observer ?

I think it's a confusion with the subjective phenomenon that when we do not see something, it goes into probabilities into our mind because we are not sure about it, and comes back when we look again.

That's materialism assuming that humans are the only observers.


Well, it receeds farther when you take on the concept that every electron and everything on up has sentience from a deeper source than specifically our selves (in an Earthly sense) and that things happen via mutual agreement - ie. we can manipulate matter and outcomes with our thoughts but we don't do nearly as well as solipsizing it out of existence.

I would like to say that Christians, Jews, Muslims, and historically the ancient celts, do not/did not really see the symbols their religions used as an accurate representation of their God(s). This is why the abrahamic religions forbid idols, and why the celts mocked the idols of the romans.

Jesus is generally considered to be just one aspect of a greater divinity. To what extent Jesus was human and to what extent he was divine is hard to say: the Bible is not clear on this. But Jesus did make it very clear that he was less than God, telling a disciple not to call him good, for only God is good, and when asking God if he could not be crucified, he said that he wanted God's will to be done, not his. The point is Jesus being crucified is not exactly the Christian image of the Godhead.

But if there are other observers, what the point in saying that consciousness creates reality, because we are talking about human consciousness, neural consciousness. What other consciousness could there be ? And so where do you put normal consciousness in the process ?


What do you mean by that ? Solipsism cannot be true because of the problem of continuity I've just mentionned.

If I understand what you are saying, it is that consciousness is not only in living things ? But as you know there is a need for a neural structure, so where do you find any structure for this impersonal consciousness ?


I understand what you mean, but I think it is not meaning for believers. If you say to a christian that the word Jesus is crap, I'm not sure he or she would agree. Maybe someone from a christian culture can believe in god the way you say, but then it's a deist, not a theist.

I'm not convinced by the explanation that forbidden idols has something to do with non representability of god. But I wonder what is the right explanation then. Maybe something to do with power. If people are satisfied with a statue, then what's the point in the bible, and so on. So the clergy would loose their power.

That just means that Jesus took on a subservient role. It is a divine exercise in humility.


Actually, Jesus did NOT tell a disciple not to call Him good. Jesus asked him why he called Him good. If only God is good, and you call Jesus good, you're acknowledging that God and Jesus are one and the same, which was the whole point. You could rephrase Jesus' question as "Are you calling Me God?"


Leading by example. Jesus is demonstrating the extent to which He subjects Himself to the will of the Father.

Last edited by AngelRho on 10 Sep 2012, 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.