Is that God talking?
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"I behave as if that's the case, but I'm not absolutely certain, sure, or without a doubt, that I'm not dreaming or deluded about the objective nature of thus forum."
And there's your problem: you've been bamboozled by this idea of absolute certainty. There isn't such a thing as absolute certainty: it's a complete red herring. Get rid of it.
When we evaluate claims, we do so to degrees of likelihood, based on evidence. The likelihood may be very high in some circumstances -- we know that it is very likely, for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow because of the massive amounts of evidence we have -- but achieving absolute certainty is both impossible and irrelevant.
The point is that based on evidence, we can conclude that when I flew across a field under my own power, that was the kind of thing called a "dream," which is only accessible to me, whereas my posting these words is accessible to anyone who cares to look.
It's completely irrelevant that we can't be "absolutely certain" about that because we can determine, to a high degree of likelihood, that what I've just said is likely to be the case (especially given the fact that I'm just talking about labeling stuff and not asserting any absolute ultimate ontology about anything).
"Btw, I didn't see you mention it in this thread, but have you any personal experience hearing the voice of God?"
As I've said elsewhere, I have all sorts of experiences chatting up imaginary entities, such as Enochian spirits, and I've had experience "receiving" texts and the like.
To the best of my knowledge, though, I've never had an auditory hallucination, with the possible exception of one time when I was falling asleep and heard what sounding like someone calling my name. I quickly concluded that it was -- to a high degree of likelihood -- some kind of semi-dream or trick the mind plays as one approaches sleep.
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@gmugmble said
" So if it makes you happy to call the ordinary waking perception of a couch hallucination, then fine, but you have to recognize that it is of a different kind -- it has distinct characteristics and a different neurological cause -- from, say, the hallucinations caused by macular degeneration, those we call hypnogogic imagery, those associated with schizophrenia, the boring ear-ringing called tinnitus, etc."
Yes, exactly. And given the way that "hallucination" is commonly used, I find it deeply disingenuous to apply it to ordinary waking perception, as if the practical distinction -- which people can and do make all the time -- isn't valid.
It certainly does "make people happy" to play word games like that to their detriment. I would argue that it makes them so "happy" precisely because it enables them to make spurious arguments to support incredibly fatuous claims. After all, they will poorly reason, if everything's hallucination, then everything's equally real, and if everything's equally real, then that "communication" that they just received from a supposed Inner Plane Contact Secret Chief Oogity-Boogity Goblin Man is just as "valid" as anything else, so they have full license to give credence to these fantasies as if they carry some kind of weight.
It's a bunch of rational sleight-of-hand, and it's the exact reason that the Book of the Law curses reason -- too many people use reason not as it's supposed to be used (to reveal what's what) but to conceal what's what from themselves in order to indulge their pleasant fantasies.
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@JNV33 said
"Los,
As said elsewhere, you argue the couch is real because other mental apparitions that you experience (people) agree with you."I argue that the couch is "outside my head" because "outside my head" is a label that we put on things that appear within perception (the perception that is entirely subjective) that seem to be accessible to any impartial observer (who appears within that perception).
Meanwhile, my thoughts about the couch -- which are equally real, by the way -- are only available to me.
The perception is entirely within my head, but within that perception I can distinguish between things that are "in my head" (in an entirely different sense of the phrase) and "not in my head."
This is an easy distinction to make, and we all do it every day. Pretty much the only reason that anyone would object so strongly to this point is if one wishes to disingenuously play word games to hold on to delusive little fantasies.
" If we were in a fictional reality like the one described in the Matrix, all your neighbors would agree the couch exists. And yet Neo and company would know that what you call a couch is actually a mental manifestation; an illusion."
It wouldn't matter. If we were in the Matrix, there would be no way to know that we were in the Matrix, which makes it totally irrelevant.
"We have the ability to distinguish one thing from another; we can slice and dice the experience stream however we choose. We make many distinctions habitually and subconsciously, and we may believe in their objective reality. But that does not make it so."
I think you're getting confused because you think I'm making some kind of ultimate ontological claims. I'm not. I'm distinguishing between stuff that appears to me because being able to distinguish is useful.
"Having said that, being able to reliably distinguish a couch is handy if you want to sit."
Exactly. See? That wasn't so hard.
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I'm fine operating without certainty, but thanks for the suggestions. I was pointing out that you're the one tripping up the conversation by using your pet definitions of things like "sure".
Using the dictionary definitions of the words you use, it appears that your earlier statements are more dogmatic than your later statements indicate.
I'm not sure how much of the debate is ontological vs semantic.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"I'm fine operating without certainty, but thanks for the suggestions. I was pointing out that you're the one tripping up the conversation by using your pet definitions of things like "sure"."
At what point earlier in this thread do I use the word "sure"?
A quick search does not show me using it on the first page of the discussion: it was Jim Eshelman who injected the word in the discussion by asking if I was "sure" about what i was saying.
That's what prompted me to point out that "sure" -- in the sense of absolutely certain -- isn't necessary.
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You're right, my mistake.
I was under the impression that you believed with certainty that an objective world exists outside of our subjective perceptions.
I think a lot of people on this forum have the same impression, but whether that's them misreading you, or you communicating poorly, I'm not sure, without going through all your previous comments.
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Los talks about "The Evidence" as if it's a consensual affair, that we all agree about what "The Evidence" is and what it means; when what he really means by "The Evidence" is the way he sees things through his archaic, anachronistic, over-simplified, narrow-minded, myopic, sceptical-atheistic-naturalistic-morally-nihilisitc weltanschauung.
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@Los said
"At what point earlier in this thread do I use the word "sure"...?
That's what prompted me to point out that "sure" -- in the sense of absolutely certain -- isn't necessary."
You're backpedalling (again). You're poor choice of language makes you come off ambiguous and agenda driven. You constantly use cognitively distorted All-Or-Nothing-Thinking terms (cf. Albert Ellis and David D. Burns), either/or reductive logic, and commit Is of Identity/Aristotelian conjugational errors (cf. Alfred Korzybksi, the guy who actually coined the phrase, "The map is not the territory.") The commission of these and similar errors strongly imply surety and certainty.
Eg.:
@Los said
"All experiences are..."
"All" implies All-Or-Nothing-Thinking/Is of Identity distortions/errors.
@Los said
"...But a healthy individual is very capable of distinguishing -- within those experiences perceived by the mind -- between things. Two primary categories -- again, within the world perceived through subjective experience -- we call "things in the mind" (such as thoughts or emotions or hallucinations) and "things not in the mind" (such as the couch in front of me).Either/or reduction fallacies (healthy/unhealthy, subjective experience/objective experience, mind is insidie the skin/ not-mind is outside the skin, etc...)"@Los said
"...That's the other (very different) meaning of "inside the mind."
Just because the word "mind" can be used to describe both (1) the vehicle of perception itself and (2) a category of things within perception doesn't mean that the two are identical: they're not. They're totally different things..."
"totally" implies surety/certainty via all three of the errors above and creates a false dichotomy
@Los said"...and mixing them up merely because they can share the same label is precisely confusing the map for the territory."
Same errors, again, and you're mis-using the map/territory simile: the map and the territory change, not one or the other.@Los said
"...Here's an example to illustrate what I mean: it's true..."
"true" implies certainty/surety, per error commisions as above
@Los said
"...that every single..."
"every single" implies certainty/surety, as above
@Los said
"...experience I have is one that I have to perceive with my mind, and it can therefore be said to be "inside the mind." But within that experience my mind perceives, I'm more than capable of distinguishing between a couch and my thoughts about the couch. I know..."
"know" implies certainty/surety, as above
@Los said
"...that the couch can be perceived by any impartial observer...;"
"impartial" implies certainty/surety, as above
@Los said
"...my thoughts about the couch can only"
"only" implies certainty/surety, as above
@Los said
"...be perceived by me....The mere fact"
"mere fact" implies certainty/surety, as above
@Los said"...that we"
"we" presumes consensus where it cannot be demonstrated and implies errors as above
@Los said
"...can use a single label to describe one of the categories and the vehicle of perception itself in no way means that the distinction between the categories isn't valid." -
When the machine is faulty, the product is faulty - we can't blame the operator.
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@Los said
"The couch is something that any impartial observer can detect. My thoughts about the couch can only be detected by me.
Further, my thoughts about the couch have no impact on what the couch actually is. For example, I may misremember the couch as being darker than it actually is, and I can later discover that my thought doesn't match the actual state of affairs with regards to the couch's color."
Funny that you should talk about thoughts when I inquired what defines it outside your mind.
How do you insure that your own bias does not effect the impartial observer?
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"Is this God talking?"
"No, it's Los talking." -
@Jim Eshelman said
"In today's NY Times, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has documented a new that people who practice substantially the methods recommended by Abramelin will obtain results substantially the same as those the same as those predicted by Abramelin.
www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/opinion/is-that-god-talking.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
While many of the results are banal, their character is much the same as one expects from the opening level of HGA phenomena. I'm taken with how the author's language resembles Karl Germer's remark, "Intense practices and invocations make the soul capable to react and understand the language of the HGA better and clearer.""
(First, a digression. Reading Luhrmann's book has opened my eyes to the existence of a major development in American Protestant Xianity of which I was unaware, that is neither the Protestantism in which I was raised nor the crusty fundamentalism that has such a depressingly great influence on American politics. These new trends have almost no continuity with traditional Xianities, despite their emphasis on the Bible, and I would describe them as the New Age (both the best and the worst of it) + Jesus.)
There's a passage in When God Talks Back (p. 121) where Luhrman describes how members of the churches she studied would experience a transition from verbal prayer to a nonverbal prayer. "'I always start off talking,' Rachel said, 'but then you get into this place where you just feel so connected, and then your thoughts are flowing into God and his response is flowing into you, and then even that gets blurry and you just feel this oneness. And that feels good.'"
This reminds me strikingly of Molinos. Because I am a spiritual snob, my reaction is to suppose that these Xians are only experiencing a kind of emotional exuberence, a mere parody of a true spiritual exaltation. But due to my lifelong habit of always contradicting my own thoughts, I must wonder if in fact either (1) these new Xians really are experiencing the spiritual transports of which Molinos writes and my reaction is just sour grapes, or (2) the supposed spiritual transports of Molinos were merely a kind of emotional exuberance of no significance, and there is nothing to this mysticism stuff after all.
There is in fact an edition of Molinos produced by and for these new Xians. (I haven't read it; I just now ordered a copy.) I'm told it does violence to the source, omitting large sections and dumbing down the rest. Now I'm interested to see for myself.
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I wonder if that's actually he version I got in the late '70s or early '80s, produced somewhere in the Plains States. The foreword was clear that they included nothing that would put words in Molinos' mouth that seemed at odds with Christianity (or something to that effect).
Yes, this is sooooo Molinos. I recognized that in the original NY Times op ed.
PS - OK, just found my copy of The Spiritual Guidepublished by Christian Books in Augusta, ME in 1982, made possible by "the unselfish donation of time given by Mrs. JoAnne Chappell of Oklahoma City." In the Preface, it says:
"I feel I need to explain to you just how much of the original book is found here. I imagine some very devout young man picking this book up, hoping that all of The Spiritual Guide is included here, only to discover it is not, and then trying to find an original copy to make sure I didn't leave out something important. I invite you to do so, but you are going to be terribly disappointed in y9our efforts.
First, you will discover there are no old editions of this book which are even remotely near modern English and reading the old edition will be, at least, laborious. Secondly, you are going to find a book steeped in a vocabulary that will almost certainly leave you completely lost as to its meaning.
I have extracted the terminology unique to the seventeenth century, and the vocabulary unique to Roman Catholicism. I have also left out a great deal that has its foundations not in an evangelical view of the Scripture but in the long tradition of Roman Catholic mysticism. Most Roman Catholic "contemplation" cannot be found or justified in Scripture but *.
What then is left? There are some things I found in Molinos' writings that made the hair on my head stand up. I assure you I left all of that out! [...] As best I could I have tried to put into this book those things which Molinos learned from the Lord Himself. Most of what can be found here would be acceptable to any evangelical who is familiar with a deeper understanding of things found in Scripture. I do not hesitate to tell you that I have also left some things in the book that seem to be uniquely Michael Molinos'!"
That last line always killed me! (Not filled me.)
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It turns on our knowing/knowledge itself.. of how "God" is conceived within a paradigm of thought.
My conclusions were that it cant be forced, tortured, tricked, manipulated, made to be..
'It' is revealed to anything willing to listen. -
When I was in seminary, which was a "moderate" Baptist seminary, we were focused on the influence of postmodern, post-foundationalist thought. There was much discussion of the "new Evangelicals" and "post-Liberals."
But that aside, I was raised a very conservative Baptist, yet I remember from childhood people talking about losing the ability/necessity to pray using words when continuing in prayer over time. My own experience as I grew older reflected the same, and that ended up being a foundational experience in my leaving the ministry to pursue the ancient wisdom. Words grew less important than symbols in understanding and relating to "God" inwardly, especially after seminary revealed the relativity of theology as it evolved through time.
I'll leave the question of the "reality" of mystical experiences to your own musings.