/lit/ - Literature

>>11241855
The mods apparently don’t want Spirit to know itself. Symbolic of Satan’s will to separate from God.

i also want that thread to be continued. based neoplatonists and other mystics are always a win.

>>11241863
then let's continue it

>Modern physics is perfectly happy with creatio ex nihilo meaning that things began as a zero-energy Universe, negative energy will become dark energy and positive energy will becomes matter, the sum equals zero. This is not a statement on a `cause' behind the origin of the Universe, nor is it a statement on a lack of purpose or destiny. It is simply a statement that the Universe was emergent, that the actual of the Universe probably derived from a indeterminate sea of potentiality that we call the quantum vacuum, whose properties may always remain beyond our understanding.

>The cosmic singularity, that was the Universe at the beginning of time, is shielded by the lack of any physical observers. But the next level of inquiry is what is the origin of the emergent properties of the Universe, the properties that become the mass of the Universe, its age, its physical constants, etc. The answer appears to be that these properties have their origin as the fluctuations of the quantum vacuum.

>>11241855
What I really wanna know is how God is fully developed, when God fully knows Himself. Is there ever a moment when development is complete, or is it eternal? Does consciousness reach a maximum state of awareness or is it always improving? Or am I thinking too temporally?

>>11241855
Was gonna originaly reply on the other thread.

I was trying to create a brand new tarot deck conposed on 5 suits of 11 and began wondering what the "0" of a suit would represent, and from there I reached this same conclusion / world view like 2 days ago without reading any books that explored these themes.

It started as a self admitted BS pseudo science gig to take money from dumb people but it turned out It really was good as a philosophic exercise.

>>11241887
Eternally complete AND improving. Chew on that.

>>11241890
You got it m8.

>>11241875
these were the questions that OP asked in the other thread. i made a PDF of them before it was deleted

>tfw you realize the very nature of being is logically self creating
>the finite implies the infinite by necessity
>the only thing infinity lacks is finitude which necessitates the creation of the finite
>this is the birth of all polarity which constitutes being and we are god coming to know himself eternally
>tfw hegel, the kabbalists, the daoists and the mystics were irrefutably right
>there is a logical explanation for existence and it is ascertainable by the mind of man

when i think about things sometimes i sometimes feel pretty melancholy about a lot of it, but i like these kind of cheerful posts. so i'm actually quite glad OP made the thread and i'm not samefagging.

don't have much to contribute on these questions but i like following these threads. i often think that all we can do really - maybe this is a kind of turnaround after a great age of disaffection and irony - is actually discover how much simulation and empathy have in common. that we all want to be free in a sense to go on exploring these questions, and the meaning of technology and art is essentially to create modes and methods of simulation in this way. it doesn't even matter what, but things only acquire value inasmuch as they are theatres of consciousness in this way, ways of allowing minds to do what they want to do.

don't pay any attention to me tho, i'm just rambling. carry on with the thread

>>11241890
Somehow I reached this conclusion 5 days ago when thinking of potentiality and actuality. My reasoning was for any change to occur the potential must be distinct from the actual. For example, a moving ball is at a different location than before. But all actuality has the form of existence, so the potential must be distinct from all existence, so it must be non-existence, or nothing. But I like the unlimited/limited explanation better.

>Subjectification is nothing more than a spinning in the positively charged void of freedom. In the latter's aftermath, we become irrevocably lost in a series of dream-like images, a rhapsody of sociopolitical phantasmagoria, which give a transcendental structure to the fabric of our experience and thus to our ethical striving, thus even making our own self just one image amongst others, but without having any basis in the world at large.

>According to Plotinus, the unmediated vision of the 'generative power' of the One, to which existents are led by the Intelligence (V.9.2), results in an ecstatic dance of inspiration, not in a satiated torpor (VI.9.8); for it is the nature of the One to impart fecundity to existents -- that is to say: the One, in its regal, indifferent capacity as undiminishable potentiality of Being, permits both rapt contemplation and ecstatic, creative extension. These twin poles, this 'stanchion,' is the manifested framework of existence which the One produces, effortlessly (V.1.6). The One, itself, is best understood as the center about which the 'stanchion,' the framework of the cosmos, is erected (VI.9.8). This 'stanchion' or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence.

>>11241908
yeah dude I really agree technology and the way art is now can help us feel and understand this on an unprecedented level, and I think subconsciously its where a lot of this frustration with mass entertainment and a dumbed-down culture come from, we know our ceilings are much higher than this

>>11241855
Something necessitates Nothing... take the Democritus pill... What is not is, just as much as what is... nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum...

>Thus in order to create, God will have to create a vacuum within himself. The place that was vacated was finite in that it was limited in relation to the Absolute All that held it. This act of contraction, or Tzimtzum, produced a void. However since there is no space outside of God, even when God contracted to a limit, the space is still filled with God himself - in a limited way. Which would mean God was immanent even in these void and hence in the subsequent creation. So we could say God is immanent in the space though he transcends it.

>In bringing about the creation as a work outside of Himself, the Eyn Sof, willfully set aside His limitlessness and adopted a path of limited action. This is called the Tzimztum ("contraction") of Eyn Sof. God has to sacrifice himself to produce the creation.

>God makes himself Necessity.

>Detachment from the fruits of action. To escape from inevitability of this kind. How? To act not for an object but from necessity. I cannot do otherwise. It is not an action but a sort of passivity. Inactive action.

>Necessity is God's veil.

>God conceals Himself to reveal Himself.

> Thus the Idea is the central point, which is also the periphery, the source of light, which in all its expansion does not come without itself, but remains present and immanent within itself. Thus it is both the system of necessity and its own necessity, which also constitutes its freedom.

>>11241919
Oh shit. Oh SHIT.

>In essence, Hegel is indicating that space, being at once indifference and difference, contains a defect and contradiction which causes it to alter itself, i.e. it contains “negation” within itself, but one which is unable to actualize itself through a true sublation of the moments of space. The element of negation or difference equally belonging to space must receive its due, must be set free and allowed to be for itself.

>Therefore, space itself and of necessity gives rise to time, which is then the negativity or difference within itself but now as existing for itself and on its own account. As Hegel says, “time is precisely the existence of this perpetual self-sublation” or negation of space and its moments (Miller 34).

just in awe of this gnosis lads

>>11241946
i do too.

i mean i'll use kind of a weird example here. in something like pic rel don't think it's necessarily all about the thrill of conquering poland. maybe in some sense that's true, but ultimately it wears off. what *doesn't* wear off is this mysterious thing about simulation itself. games aren't movies, but what's the future for all of this irony and spectacle and so on?

i've been really hung up on this for a couple of days now, and the only answer that makes sense - i know this is reductive, and it's late, so don't shit on me too much - is that the only reason we make art is to basically create a good simulator.
>not the only reason
>w/ev

simulators don't need to have *meaning,* they only need to have verisimilitude. but why? maybe just because it feels good to make something somebody else can play in .this isn't the same thing as movies and spectacle (here, Look at This) and it can't just be all about making money either. what we learn about simulators is that minds like complex toys to play with, and the more virtual things get, the more we have to keep making more intelligent games
>true, we can make viral cashgrab garbage too
>and no, HoI4 is not perfect, it's just an example
>tfw so fucking ironic you have to have internal greentext conversations with yourself in order to make a point

so, just things like this. we don't make things to contain ideas, or like some perverse show and tell, but...just for the mystery of simulation. and why would you do this except with the understanding that other minds are much like your own? and if you have that kind of intimation, how is that not...just a fucking great thought? we don't know what the difference is between the real and the fake, so we try and make a really really good simulator for the next guy...art in this sense is basically like a shit-test for your capacity for empathy (and intelligence) in this regard. junk meme trash is inevitable, but...i don't know, it's better to create wonder. which you can only do by going outside of yourself.

again, sorry for the ramble, but it's been something i've been thinking about for a while, aesthetics and simulation and tech. just glad to get it out. sorry if it's wildly off-topic.

>>11241897
>eternally complete AND improving
That sounds nice, but at the moment I don’t understand it. I will think on it.

>>11242009
>If we are still tempted to ask what [Hegel's] God is in itself [an sich], we should have to answer that it is what it does, and that what it does is timelessly do away with the illusion that it has not yet accomplished it. "The Good," Hegel says, "the absolutely Good, is eternally accomplishing itself in the world; and the result is that it needs not wait upon us [qua individuals, in whose ascent the vision of the whole is still obscured by finite perspectives],… but is already by implication, as well as in full actuality, accomplished." This last "consolidating, quietistic" step that Hegel takes, is, in the words of Professor Findlay, "one which achieves its goal by suddenly coming to see its goal in what previously seemed only an infinite, hopeless struggle towards it."

>>11242002
>but...i don't know, it's better to create wonder. which you can only do by going outside of yourself.

exactly and i think its very interesting we're so artistically and culturally impoverished even though there's more information than ever out there (which isn't to say it's all bad, the art that manages to overcome this and communicate something genuinely Other and Sublime with today's technology is almost unbearable to watch because goddamnit I wanna do that too), it's like availability tends to promote insularization, it's easier to tune out any conflicting signals. remember when you'd watch TV and whatever was on, was on? now my world is customizable and watertight and alterity comes in ice cream flavors

incidentally im gonna smoke a blunt and watch Enter the Void. late night NEET hours I guess. when the POV swoops up to the light/void right after he dies is something that only .0001% of what's getting made out there today touches

>>11241855
You should probably read modern science instead of Langan, lmao.

>>11242002
the best art, the best simulation, has that realism without actually lapsing into the Real, which is why nerd culture just loves dark and gritty reboots, it's that same escape filtered to a more mature but still fundamentally infantile sensibility, instead of the image's being outgrown it grows with us (or provides the illusion of growth). it's like a test: how much of the real can we simulate without also having to reproduce our commitment to it? how can we re-create the grit of actuality without sacrificing the escapist core? or, how can we exorcise from actuality whatever it is that provokes our flight from it? and if we ever solve that little ditty, it's ogre

>>11242109
you are like a little baby. watch this

>The universe can be described as a cybernetic system in which freedom and constraint are counterbalanced. The constraints function as structure; thus, the laws of physics are constraints which define the structure of spacetime, whereas freedom is that which is bound or logically quantified by the constraints in question. Now, since there is no real time scale external to reality, there is no extrinsic point in time at which the moment of creation can be located, and this invalidates phrases like "before reality existed" and "when reality created itself". So rather than asking "when" the universe came to be, or what existed "before" the universe was born, we must instead ask "what would remain if the structural constraints defining the real universe were regressively suspended?" First, time would gradually disappear, eliminating the "when" question entirely. And once time disappears completely, what remains is the answer to the "what" question: a realm of boundless potential characterized by a total lack of real constraint. In other words, the real universe timelessly emerges from a background of logically unquantified potential to which the concepts of space and time simply do not apply.

>Modern physics is perfectly happy with creatio ex nihilo meaning that things began as a zero-energy Universe, negative energy will become dark energy and positive energy will becomes matter, the sum equals zero. This is not a statement on a `cause' behind the origin of the Universe, nor is it a statement on a lack of purpose or destiny. It is simply a statement that the Universe was emergent, that the actual of the Universe probably derived from a indeterminate sea of potentiality that we call the quantum vacuum, whose properties may always remain beyond our understanding.

>The quantum vacuum is the ground state of energy for the Universe, the lowest possible level. Attempts to perceive the vacuum directly only lead to a confrontation with a void, a background that appears to be empty. But, in fact, the quantum vacuum is the source of all potentiality. For example, quantum entities have both wave and particle characteristics. It is the quantum vacuum that such characteristics emerge from, particles `stand-out' from the vacuum, waves `undulate' on the underlying vacuum, and leave their signature on objects in the real Universe.

>In this sense, the Universe is not filled by the quantum vacuum, rather it is `written on' it, the substratum of all existence.

>>11241855
Hey I'm the guy who started that original thread. I was really surprised when it got deleted. Felt so fishy.

>>11242155
it really doesn't make any sense when the qualia thread's still up. w/e

please contribute i liked what you were saying

>>11242159
I don't know how much more I have to contribute in terms of insight. The realization of all this struck only a couple days ago. It still kind of staggered from it and reeling in some sense, but oddly enough I feel at peace. There is something absolutely awe inspiring about it. I never once believed that the reason for existence could be grasped, and now I have seen that it not only can but has all across history. Strangely enough our forebears have had a difficult time making it clear when it felt so easy for me to explain the basic dialectic of it. What is even more insane is it confirms reincarnation. Being must always come into existence in order to complete the infinite. So when your life ends the infinite will collapse into finite being once again instantaneously. Life never ends it only evolves infinitely in order to fully know itself and become itself. But this raises many questions. Is there any kind of order to this process of rebirth? Does it have any sort of trajectory? Do we have input in its result? Are we simultaneously restricted and free? The existential ramifications of this I will be working out for the rest of my life.

>>11241855
I'm checking out the Langan interview you linked.

Within each SCSPL system, subsystems sharing critical aspects of global structure will also manifest the self-configuration imperative of their inclusive SCSPL; that is, they exist for the purpose of self-actualization or self-configuration, and in self-configuring, contribute to the Self-configuration of the SCSPL as a whole. Human beings are such subsystems. The "purpose" of their lives, and the "meaning" of their existences, is therefore to self-actualize in a way consistent with global Self-actualization or teleology...i.e., in a way that maximizes global utility, including the utility of their fellow subsystems. Their existential justification is to help the universe, AKA God, express its nature in a positive and Self-beneficial way.

If they do so, then their "souls", or relationships to the overall System ("God"), attain a state of grace and partake of Systemic timelessness ("life eternal"). If, on the other hand, they do not - if they give themselves over to habitual selfishness at the expense of others and the future of their species - then they are teleologically devalued and must repair their connections with the System in order to remain a viable part of it. And if they do even worse, intentionally scarring the teleological ledger with a massive net loss of global utility, then unless they pursue redemption with such sincerety that their intense desire for forgiveness literally purges their souls, they face spiritual interdiction for the sake of teleological integrity. "

I need to understand the ethics he is implying here. This is off the chain.

>>11242198
Check out axiarchism, Crowley, Boehme, Schelling, Kazantzakis, Jung's 7 Sermons of the Dead... all talk about it in their own way.

>>11242236
Yeah it's Spinozistic but not as reductionist I think, I don't know he's very interesting

>>11242001
I think I've understood what your quotation means, someone check my logic plz?

Because the infinite cannot manifest itself all at once without contradiction, it must proceed in eternal finite change. That way it does not contradict itself but it still manifests all of the possibilities of its limitlessness.

>>11242248
He explains later in the interview how he believes morality emerges

"Q: I have read your CTMU and some of the Q & A on the Ubiquity website regarding the CTMU and find it extremely fascinating. Much of the information resonated with many of the things I have been contemplating for the last year (or so). I wanted to know if you had any further writings on the topic especially related to the following areas. (1) The nature of the interaction(s) of the multiple levels of consciousness. (2) The nature of the connection with God via our "souls". Or just in general, the nature of the soul. Is it a more complex syntax in which we are embedded that facilitates this communication with God? Are we all embedded in it? (3) The nature of morality. Do "moral laws" have a basis in reality (loosely speaking). That is, if moral laws are mental constructs, how do the mental constructs of higher levels of consciousness affect the lower levels? That is, how does what "God thinks is right" affect us (lower forms of consciousness)? I realize that, to a degree, the above questions are really all the same, but if you have any essays or thoughts on these matters I would love to hear them.

I have more questions and thoughts but I can save those for later...

A: Yes, such writings exist, but they are (as yet) mostly unpublished. Don’t worry, I'll get them out there somehow. As for your specific questions on morality, the following should suffice. In the CTMU, “what God thinks is right” is encapsulated by the Telic Principle. This principle, a generalization of the Cosmological Anthropic Principle, asserts that by logical necessity, there exists a deic analogue of human volition called teleology.

However, due to the fact that God’s Self-creative freedom is distributed over the universe, i.e. His “Mind”, human volition arising within the universe is free to be locally out of sync with teleology. This requires a set of compensation mechanisms which ensure that teleology remains globally valid despite the localized failure of any individual or species to behave consistently with it. In part, these mechanisms determine the state of your relationship to God, i.e. your soul. If you are in harmony with teleology – with the self-realization and self-expression of God – then your soul is in a state of grace. If you are not, then your soul is in danger of interdiction by teleological mechanisms built into the structure of the universe. "

I'll have to think on this for a while. I can't believe how much this ties in with Jordan Peterson's concepts of transgression against being, spiritual alignment, meaning as a guide to being, and equilibrated states.

>>11242286
Actuality and potentiality aren't really Hegel's purview but it was interesting that you (or the other anon) said that potentiality as motion has to be "non-existence" since actuality has to be existence. What Hegel's saying I guess is that pure space contains a contradiction in itself, is itself negated by its indifferent difference with itself. Pure space is a "this" that is only formally differentiated from all instances of "that". This contradiction is the seed that sets in motion the entire movement of God.

So it's not so much the infinite escapes contradiction by manifesting as finite being, but that the infinite is already in contradiction and finite being is simultaneously the actualization of /and/ drive to resolve this contradiction.

>>11242310
yes the universe seems to have teleological failsafes that upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be basic principles of systems theory. even the notion of evil souls dissolving in the outer darkness kinda intimates this, that pluralities without centers are inherently dissolutive. the spirit is the "sun" that ensures synchronization with langan's global teleology.

schelling has a lot to say about this as well. the dark principle as the principle of an unconscious will is effective only its self-suspension, only when it provides the basis on which spirit works. spirit is the ground's (self-)domestication. when the ground asserts itself, healthy top-down causation in the organism is threatened. global unity is inverted into dispersive particularization. what's interesting here is langan's potentiality can be tied to schelling's dark ground, as an unconscious potentiality of willing that wills to will only its own willing

in essence evil is the assertion of telic "unbounded potential" (Chaos) within the logic of the real (God, ie a self-consistent ontological syntax). God exists as a stomach that "digests" transcendent potential to realize freedom and groundlessness within necessity, AS necessity.

>All of this can be reduced to a very elaborate response to the voluntarist dichotomy (the chasm between a god who is good and a god who is totally free). One that, modulated through the alchemical tradition, simultaneously generates a notion of a divine unconscious and casts this unconscious as a dyspeptic divine gut. “The soul is a (disobedient) stomach!” For, insofar as intelligence is made out of rules, preconscious and unlimited freedom is better expressed by excrement (that which exceeds regimentation). It all goes to show that even God could never fully assimilate or anabolise the potency he is grounded — and fed — upon. This is largely because it is God: an elder, impersonal, pre-individual, and unrestrained aspect of ‘himself’. It is no coincidence that Schelling, and later Jung, borrowed the language of alchemical prima materia to describe the journey from unconsciousness to subjectivity.21 The upshot of all of this is as follows: Creation is the by-product of the worst dyspepsia imaginable — an indigestion so cosmic that it forced God himself to become self-conscious. It is a traumatic self-awakening that impels God to limit himself against the unlimited and anonymous power of chaos: a delimitation that therefore requires an excremental purging of this chaotic base matter.

>And so, we arrive finally at Miltonic Chaos. Chaos is the ultimate hypostatisation of the auto-productive tendency latent within matter: the tendency to metastatise into its own self-selecting end-orientation — rather than the holy direction of divinely-sanctioned totality — thus coming more and more to threaten the primacy and integrity of the ‘host’ whole. Chaos is ontological cancer and crap. As Milton decrees, it is “neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire / But all these in their pregnant causes mixed” and it is likewise simultaneously “strait, rough, dense, or rare” (Chaos fizzes) [PL; ii.912-3, 948]. Again, it is ontological overabundance not ontological paucity. As such, whilst wading through this superseding elemental indigest, Satan simultaneously “swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes” — there is no medium-specificity here [PL; ii.950]. Qualities and essences overflow rather than withdraw. Thus, despite being hermeneutically linked with ‘ontological deficiency’ (because of its position as an allegorical figure), Milton’s Chaos is total superfluity. Chaos is the excremental pregnancy — the menstrual chaos and “waste fertility” — of God and Creation: the excrement of the cosmic archeus, it is that which fails to be incorporated (digested) into the happy hylomorphism (the agreeable working of the stomach-soul) within God’s intestinal system. Chaos as cosmic dyspepsia.

>>11242341
This is the best thread ive ever seen on /lit/

One thing that occurs to me reading this is that evolution is a mechanism of reaching equilibrium. Being is trying to sustain its actualization out of necessity and so beings that transgress this sufficiently are erased. Destructive members of tribes do not reproduce and are killed, species that annihilate others in excess undermine their own sustainability etc. Basically being demands that beings care a certain amount about other beings in order to sustain the reproduction of consciousness, which is exactly what the infinite constantly does. My version is less sophisticated than those which we've discussed but I think the basic idea is right.

>>11242371
Yes it is, Kaczynski actually talks about this, tribes that prioritize short-term gratification by the rapid consumption of resources threaten their long-term survival. Tribes with more sustainable lifestyles win out more in the end. It's a "teleology" that's just inseperable from the natural group dynamics of daily life. Even fat people reveal this principle. The unity is bent toward the gratification of a part.

>>11241855
>>11241863
>>11241875
>>11241931
>>11241965
>>11241978
>>11242001
>>11242002
>>11242098
>>11242127
>>11242140
>>11242198

Away with thee, Satan.

what the fuck

>>11242433
I laughed very hard at this comment and felt joy. Be happy you brought that moment into being.

>>11242447
I was just thinking the same thing as I was smiling uncontrollably. Wow

>>11242454
synchronicity baby

>>11242411
Based Jesusposter.
Friendly reminder that Gnosticism is Heresy.

>>11242465
These are ideas expounded by actual Christian mystics. Educate yourself.

>>11242470
Okay. These Christian mystics write any books?

>>11242473

Cloud of Unknowing

Meister Eckhart's Collected Sermons

Simone Weil's Gravity & Grace

Jakob Boehme's Mysterium Magnum

bump

>>11242371
I also like this thread. Any lit recs to become woke?

>>11242959
a simple start would be Plotinus. read his articles on the IEP and SEP

>Boehme says: "For out of nature is God a Mysterium, i.e. the Nothing; for from out of nature is the Nothing, which is an eye of eternity, a groundless eye, which stands nowhere nor sees, for it is the Ungrund and the selfsame eye is a will, i.e. a longing for manifestation, to discern the Nothing"}. The Ungrund thus is the Nothing, the groundless eye of eternity, yet together with this it is will, without foundation, unfathomable and indeterminate will. But this -- is a Nothing, which is {"a hunger to be something"}. And together with this the Ungrund is freedom. Within the darkness of the Ungrund there is ablaze a fire and this is freedom, a freedom meonic with potential.

>Boehme was perhaps the first in the history of human thought to have seen, that at the basis of being and prior to being lies a groundless freedom, the passionate desire of the Nothing to become something, the darkness, within which would blaze the fire and light, i.e. he was the originator of an unique metaphysical voluntarism, unknown to Medieval and ancient thought. Will, i.e. freedom, is at the origin of everything. But Boehme thinks it is so because the conjectured Ungrund, the groundless will lies within the depths of the Divinity, and prior to the Divinity. The Ungrund is also the Divinity of apophatic theology and is together with this an abyss, a free Nothing deeper than God and outside God. In God there is a nature, a principle distinct from It. The Primal-Divinity, the Divine Nothing -- is on the other side of good and evil, of light and darkness. The Divine Ungrund -- is somehow prior to the arising within eternity of the Divine Trinity. God arises, realises Himself from out of the Divine Nothing.

>The Nothing is deeper and more primeval than anything that is, the darkness is deeper and more primordial than light, freedom is more primordial and deeper than any nature.

>>11242098
>now my world is customizable and watertight and alterity comes in ice cream flavors

i know this feel. but i actually think that this is kind of a great place to start from. we humans like ice cream. and psychic ice cream is the best.

what does vidya do? it takes the next step out from cinema. true, atm the masterworks of cinema are better than the masterworks of vidya. but it's because we're still figuring out the dimensions of this stuff.

give somebody a kind of virtuality to be in, give them a shell, a complex semiotic machine to put their mind in, and see what they can do with it. i'm hung up on HoI not because it's a war game, but because in a kind of deleuzian sense i wonder if this is what it means to be a kind of BwO. you're given this gigantic and purely semiotic second body...but where are 'you,' the player, in all of this? the object isn't necessarily to win, it's to be an artist of state...

maybe this sounds crazy but i'm really hung up on this idea these days.

>>11242127
>it's like a test: how much of the real can we simulate without also having to reproduce our commitment to it? how can we re-create the grit of actuality without sacrificing the escapist core? or, how can we exorcise from actuality whatever it is that provokes our flight from it?

yes. all of this. Absolute Escapism is no more a possibility than Absolute Realism. we're somewhere in between those poles. but simulation which sets itself up in advance to be deconstructed becomes Spectacle, becomes irony, becomes total ressentiment. it warrants exactly what critical theory does to it.

what we might be doing is saying, look, you have no way of knowing who you are except through simulation, except through virtuality. what is being simulated, the content, doesn't really matter. what matters is *fidelity.* it's true that the map is not the territory, but with virtuality you kind of are the map, and simulation is the territory, brought to you by algorithms and computation.

i know this probably sounds completely bizarre, and it's very off the cuff, but i'm sort of wondering how much a synthesis of deleuze and baudrillard is possible without sacrificing what makes either of them interesting. we *make mechanisms for the specularization of consciouness.* we can't simulate the ultimate simulator (us). so what can we do? make virtual masks, virtual landscapes, try not to try and box in that which always escapes...

>>11242959
Phenomenology of spirit
Cognitive Theoretic Model of The Universe
Kabbalists
Eastern Religious Tradition
Theosophy

>>11242098
I remember being 18 too

>this thread

>>11242411
This. Fucking heathens.

>>11243374
understanding the origination and groundswell of being seems to have a way of encouraging friendly discourse

>: if mediation in mysticism is preserved as mediation, one is necessarily barred from the full, mystical union with the divine “without distinction”; but if mediation is negated in mysticism, then one forecloses the possibility of comprehending the mystical union as such, there being neither thought nor that which is thought. In short, it appears that mysticism presents us with a theory of mediation that is inherently self-negating, a theory of mediation in which the fulfillment of mediation is in fact the negation of all mediation.

>In this final type of mediation, mediation is so perfect that it negates mediation itself, with not even a residue of difference left behind, “a modeless abyss of fathomless beatitude.” With neither a subject-object distinction, nor a mediated context within which they can be made indistinct, the human-philosophical capacities of the empirical, the volitional, and the conceptual are all incapacitated. “There they fall away from themselves and become lost in a state of unknowing which has no ground.” [22] This is the final stage of apophaticism, “the dark stillness which always stands empty,” where the mystical subject is a non-subject, “drunk with love and asleep in God in a dark resplendence

>In the third sense of the term “nothing,” Eckhart notes that “[s]eeing nothing, he saw God. The light that is God flows out and darkens every light…the Nothing was God.” [30] Here Eckhart makes a transition from the relation between creatures and God, to the relation of creatures to God. Using the mystical motifs of darkness and light, Eckhart follows in the Dionysian-apophatic tradition by describing a superlative form of darkness or nothing that goes beyond the dichotomies of light/dark, something/nothing. Here one moves from optical sight to mystical vision, from a metaphysics of being to a non-metaphysics of nothing or “the One.”

>ond preceding, must in a sense remain within its placeless providing. Thus since Non-being is the father of all that is, there is a sense in which the reditus (to non-being) precedes the exitus (to being).8 In other words, that which comes from the One ‘follows’ a (me)ontological return which ensures that its necessity does not infringe the simple, autarchical, supremacy of the One. This means that what emanates from the One, being, is not, in so far as to be is an inferior mode of existence compared to Non-being which is the only entity that really is (the really real). It is for this reason that Non-being can necessarily produce being without infringing simplicity, because to be is nothing. And as comparatively nothing, being does not actually escape the One, but remains immanent to it; being is in this sense an internal production. This is made possible by the protective negations which Plotinus employs at a methodological level throughout the Enneads.

>The normal mind is a candle in a darkened room. Throw open the shutters, and the sunlight makes the flame invisible. That is a fair image of Dhyana.

>But the mind refuses to find a simile for Atmadarshana. It seems merely ineffective to say that the rushing together of all the host of heaven would similarly blot out the sunlight.

>But if we do say so, and wish to form a further image of Shivadarshana, we must imagine ourselves as suddenly recognizing that this universal blaze is darkness; not a light extremely dim compared with some other light, but darkness itself. It is not the change from the minute to the vast, or even from the finite to the infinite. It is the recognition that the positive is merely the negative. The ultimate truth is perceived not only as false, but as the logical contradictory of truth. It is quite useless to elaborate this theme, which has baffled all other minds hitherto. We have tried to say as little as possible rather than as much as possible.

>>11243407
Listen kid, first off, what you said means literally nothing. Second of all, even if all this kabal nonsense would be true, no single mortal to have ever lived could have ever comprehended in a reasonable manner all this 'ideology', 'theory' or whatever the hell you want to call it, and third, would you pursue this, you'd end up suffering one way or another and you'd pray to Jesus the you wouldn't go mad.

>The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms, it pays attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.

>This rose will signal a mode of discourse which is ‘non-saying’, or a ‘notspeaking’. For Heidegger, we ‘must first learn to exist in the nameless’. He does not appear to mean that we initially exist in the nameless and then do not, but rather that the most basic starting point is to exist and remain in the nameless. … The rose is shown to be in a manner which is a saying without ‘words’. In a sense, it is language without language, as it is the very arrival of language. … The rose shows itself as the saying of the nameless, that which is without words, the non-saying which says.

>The rose lacks grounds, yet this lack still bespeaks a relationship to grounds, because the saying of grounds is the actual showing, or arrival, of the rose qua rose. What is happening here? For Heidegger, what happens is happening itself: ‘happening itself . . . is the only event. Being alone is. What happens? Nothing happens, if we are pursuing that which happens in happening. Nothing happens, event e-vents.’ This is the arrival of arriving. Nothing does come from nothing, and that which comes is without reason.

>>11243448
Obviously you don’t understand it as much as others in this thread, so that would cause you to be more critical of these ideas and the discussion of them. What exactly is holding you back?

>Derrida argues that language cannot have an outside; he also asserts that nothing is outside language, that is, the text. As a result, language is left in some sense bereft. Language, because it is linguistic, cannot have an outside yet, in a sense, language is but the movement towards an outside.

>Language is the ‘embodiment’ of the desire for an outside. This is true because language desires to say something, for language hopes that its significations actually bear significance. The outside is maybe the secret name for this desire. Language, in that it endeavours to communicate or to say something, wishes there to be something in what is said. In desiring thus, language desires that which is not reducible to itself. Language is in this way the desire for something other than language.

>But this other isforbidden by Derrida. Furthermore, it is declared to be impossible. It is impossible because language is language. Language as language is, then, its own limitation. Language would need to be other than language if it were to have an outside. But language is always itself, language is always language. Consequently, all signification is inside. Only nothing is outside language. As there is no outside available, language must generate one. Indeed, for Derrida language is the movement of this generation.

> ‘the Thing’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds’. What is essential to a Thing is the ‘nothing’ interior to it; its ‘structural stability’ depends upon it enclosing a void that provides an obstacle to it collapsing in on itself. This Heideggerian notion of the Thing is related to Lacan’s notion of ‘extimity’ in which the outside is located inside – i.e. the nothing ‘out there’ is the same as, or related to, the nothing ‘in here’. Further, these philosophical / psychoanalytical notions were seen by Catren as homologous to recent concepts in theoretical/mathematical physics, especially those concerned with understanding the cosmos.

>The thrust of Žižek’s argument is that Fichte successfully conceives this passage … only because he is operating with the Anstoß, an element similar to Lacan’s objet a, an ex-timate object capable of accomplishing the miracle of creatio ex nihilo where ‘nothing’ is counted as something as to its form ... The doctrine of the Anstoß is thus an ‘appearance without anything that appears,’ the very possibility of which Kant dismissed as an ‘absurd conclusion.’ (Bxxvi-xxvii) So once again we see the difference between Fichte and Kant with respect to the Thing-in-itself: whereas the Kantian necessity of thinking the Thing-in-itself carries with it a (disavowed) presupposition of its substantiality, Fichte’s own thought of Anstoß similarly denies knowledge of it as a determinate object yet nevertheless eliminates that presupposition to reveal Anstoß as ‘a positivization of a lack, a stand-in for the void.’

>>11242198
We are both, yes. The way i see it is that the present, universal moment is the easiest way for the universe to be solved before the next entropic moment, which will be the easiest then, etc. etc. In this case, easiest means most efficient. There's a problem though. This means that one result (the moment) must be biased against all other probabilities of being. Over time, this will create imbalances, imbalances that must be corrected for. These balances can ONLY be corrected over time, but given the restraint of one total moment existing at any given time, it just turns into an exercise of a dog chasing it's tail. There is an imbalance, somewhere. But I digress.

This all ties into karma. Given that sufficient effect for cause is delayed by the very speed of causality, and given that a perfect exchange of energy impossible, the universe will always be trying to correct for past imbalances. There's something exponential about this imbalance. It makes me kind of uncomfortable. yet again, i digress.

It's a bit of a truism now that the state of Being necessitates a state of suffering. For any entity, that suffering will take different forms and vary in degree. I have this crazy hypothesis that reincarnation not only inevitable, but plays a role in this cycle of balance-seeking. Kill a man in this life, he'll be a billionaire in the next while you'll be destined to some lower layer of hell. Metaphorically, speaking. Maybe. But it's more complicated than that. Given (presumably, as a thought experiment) that reincarnation exists, how many active virtual karmic threads does one have attached to them at any time? How far back do they go? Will I be suffering, in this life, for the totality of mistakes my previous incarnation's may have made? Is atonement for those mistakes possible?

Mind you, this could all be mental masturbation. I can't say I have the faith necessary to believe that any experience playing into these possible delusions are true representations of reality. Im a bit too skeptical for that but over time i'm finding myself convinced that there's something more to life, the universe, and everything. I apologize for any incoherence presented. I'm not usually willing to explore these thoughts outside of myself. It's a new experience for me.

>The process of subjectification (culture) emerges out of the ontological chasm opened up by the pure I and holds a position of infinite difference with respect to nature insofar as it operates within a zone of logical non-coincidence that has been carved out from within the laws of the latter. Instead of a self-enclosed spiral or circle of circles, we see an immanent “break” that prevents the next dialectical phase of self-appropriation from occurring and by means of which another level of autonomous activity irreducible to the first can take hold. The image is of two cones—one ontologically positive, the other immersed in a virtual zone of nonbeing—linked together by a black hole that is the pure I, the night of the world, whereby nature and culture self-actualize in isolation to one another, but are nevertheless negatively tied together by the abyssal void of subjectivity—that which “protrudes” out of both as an impossible in-between non-explicable in either.

>Life thus deposes me from myself, making me seek what is ever beyond me. Such life is a permanent deficit and a tragic drive, a contradiction in terms, a living death. Being themselves, all things affirm what they are not. "Their life is suicide". Having hypostatized a "will-in-itself" at the bottom of one's qualities, Michelstaedter is unable to predicate anything of this essential will except an intrinsic nothing.

>Thus far the stipulations of Persuasion and Rhetoric may be summarized as follows: Willing is the essence of subjectivity; this willing is subjected to an alienating progression of exclusive moments; it must find its satisfaction in itself alone.

>Thus Michelstaedter makes explicit the nihilism inherent in the subjectivist tradition. Once consciousness refuses to forego its quest for a meaning that is no longer available, it is left to affirm nothing but voiceless passion. That is the point at which "man would rather will nothingness than not will at all." Suicide becomes the self's only proper act, its sole affirmation, the form of a transcendent and impossible identity.

>Having sketched an oil lamp in the process of extinction, Michelstaedter glosses it with these words in Greek: "The lamp goes out for lack of oil. I, overflowing at the brim, extinguished myself."

>Being is what is immediate, and as a result it is empty. For Hegel, pure Being marks the beginning of the movement of the idea. Generally Being is approached as what is fundamental, or as that which is most important. But, for Hegel, it is addressed as mere Being because Being is an abstraction which instead of providing ‘absolute plenitude is but ‘absolute emptiness’.

>The problem with Being is that it cannot articulate itself, in the sense that it cannot be located. Any attempt at location requires a term of specification, a ‘concrete characterization’. In other words, Being to be located must become this or that being, but this means that Being to be Being has to become other than what it is. We must remember that Being is the most general of all, pure immediate self-identity. As Hegel says, ‘every additional and more concrete characterisation causes Being to lose that integrity and simplicity it has in the beginning’.

>Being, to be, must other itself. But the other of Being is Nothing. This means, it seems, that Being must become Nothing in order to be in a sense beyond its own emptiness (nothingness). Hegel asserts quite forcefully that Being is Nothing.

>Thus Schelling and Hegel posit a correlation between the melancholy of human subjectivity and the suffering God: specifically, our melancholic suffering is a trace of a metaphysical principle of negation, of God's otherness as the ground of God's darkness and death.

>Profound boredom is the mood in which the nothing transpires as the ground of Dasein itself. With Levinas, the familiar experience of fatigue and paresse reveals the articulation of the existent to existence as the "horror of impersonal existence." Henry discovers that subjectivity itself is coeval with melancholic pathos. With Heidegger, Levinas, and Henry melancholy is accepted by the individual self as its own intrinsic condition: its incarnation in consciousness has been completed.

>Altizer clarifies that [in the Cross] a body of absolute death/otherness is released and actualized through the depths of melancholy, which give us a taste of God's Other as the center of our own being

>>11243546
You can think of karma just within the bounds of your present finitude. You literally reap the rewards and punishments of your past actions presently. You are always being visited upon for your transgressions and simultaneously presented with opportunity to correct yourself and realign with the good. If we expand the scope of discussion to reincarnation, it seems possible that you would live out all beings that have ever been before and ever will be. So every cost imposed and kindness given is visited upon you again in a perfect justice. This creates an incentive to do right by all other beings. Of course exactly how reincarnation would function and its exact trajectory is not at all clear to me so this is speculation.

As for your concern about exponential imbalance I think this is a flase concern. Being is always trying to reach a state of equilibrium. This is necessary to perpetuate itself because beings that don't reproduce being cease to exist and the nature of the universe is necessarily that which comes into existence. So there are confines to our actions imposed by the necessity of being that essentially means that if you transgress against being it scars you and eliminates you. And beings that sufficiently align with this ethic flourish. Being imposes restrictions that guarantee a certain amount of good behavior.

It seems natural selection is inherently inclined to produce ethics that promote flourishing and this is essentially logically imposed by the nature of being itself.

>Because one continually sees the world through the lens of [a] desired equilibrium, one never pays attention to things as they are, but “cloaks” them with the thought of the satisfaction, restitution, compensation, or reward they are imagined to promise us. However, Weil thinks that this tendency is deeply rooted in life itself, insofar as each living thing acts as an inside that appropriates what lies outside it for its own purposes, for its own future.

>It follows, then that to contemplate things as they are, “unshrouded by some imagined future,” is to see things as though one were dead; “[o]ne has to be dead to be able to see things in their nakedness.”

>In one sense, then, to refuse to seek compensations or balance— whether this is through the act of forgiveness, through accepting a lack of recognition or reward, or through honestly attending to the reality of some present suffering—is also to accept death, as she notes memorably on one occasion: “To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death.”

>Conversely, the dynamic that she describes as “the search for equilibrium” is itself the manifestation of the denial of death. There is a sense in which death is the ultimate sign of imbalance, for it marks the point beyond which no counterbalance, repayment, or compensation is possible, and marks out our lives as essentially unbalanced and unfinished. To accept death is to accept that one’s vital energy is essentially limited, and that one is destined to lose all of it.

*blocks your nihilism*

>>11242001
what a bunch of bollocks

>>11243475
I've read this same nonsense weeks ago. It's all nonsense gibberish that literally means nothing.
I'll pray for your soul, anon. Stop doing drugs.

>>11243351
>what we might be doing is saying, look, you have no way of knowing who you are except through simulation, except through virtuality. what is being simulated, the content, doesn't really matter. what matters is *fidelity.* it's true that the map is not the territory, but with virtuality you kind of are the map, and simulation is the territory, brought to you by algorithms and computation.

it's like we're just what you get when an ultimate simulator can't be simulated. i know hegel tries to communicate this. we're kind of the Idea if the Idea was substance, but of course it is, ideality establishes itself as its noncoincidence with itself, just this constant machinic repetition of 'are we there yet' that is the mechanism of specularization you're talking about.

>>11242001
>anons think real life is literally the Space-Time feud-duality of Lorkhan-Akatosh

>>11242488
>apophatic theology should be taken seriously
just as we can't say precisely what God is, we also cannot say what God is not. it's a matter of faith in both cases. y'all nerds need to step it up.

>>11243833
this isn't nihilism, most of it's just articulating the need for kenosis/mysticism

>>11243876
Which is why any proper apophasis must eventually reject "Is God unknowable?"

>>11243895
lol ook "im god" lol

woop there i go zero summin

>>11243910
>implying CHIM isn't real

besides 'im god' is just another positive claim that would have been left in the dialectical trash bin ages ago

>>11243919
*eats you*

>>11243867
thanks for the response. sorry also for interrupting another mysticism thread with my own tangents...but i think the answers to the questions i'm thinking about are usually found by mystic types in these threads.

>this constant machinic repetition of 'are we there yet' that is the mechanism of specularization you're talking about.

yeah. i think for me the idea would be, are *you* there yet? this is pretty much what i think describes the noblest goal of art inasmuch as it is simulation. did *you* get to that sort of kantian omega point? whatever it is that i/we make, solo or in studio, what is desired is a kind of proof of concept: our simulation coincided with your intimation of a supersensible unity. and in doing so something noncoincidental with itself is intimated, however evanescent.

if you can only simulate, you might as well simulate the ultimate. but you can't just simulate the ultimate head-on: you can only kind of lay out the staircase for the next guy. and maybe if that next guy cannot distinguish between the map and the territory, you've kind of passed an altogether different form of Turing Test.

>>11243856
I’ve never done drugs btw. Don’t you think it would be strange for people to seriously discuss something they don’t comprehend? Surely you must admit that others have a more intuitive understanding of these ideas than you. If something can be examined, why not delve into it? If you reach understanding, then you can judge it then, but you can’t judge something you don’t understand. I know what it’s like to read Hegel without understanding, but now I’m starting to think like Hegel, so I can understand more of what he says. The whole experience of it all must be similar to the common man’s ecstasy in religion, but less faith and more understanding. The world has never been more beautiful to me.

>>11243932
no problem at all. go nuts

I think art was this asymptotic approach to the ultimate until what, we found the ultimate to be just the inexhaustibility of the urge to simulate? maybe that the ultimate was never an object = x but the coloring novelty gave it? exactly this evanescent "noncoincidence" you're talking about? that delicate hovering on the edge of the being's mundane texture and the numinous? but then what about the really great works that survive the tests of time? they're great because they are dense and resonant enough to reproduce this novelty in almost all contextual registers. great art's like a conch shell you can always hold your ear up to. ties in with weininger's conception of genius as the person whose completed the almost alchemical operation of mirroring the universal within particularity. genius has such a mountain altitude around it, and yet it feels in touch with something so inexpressibly foundational

>>11243959
>If something can be examined, why not delve into it?
I'm not a philosopher, I've ever read Hegel and by the look at people like you, I probably never will.
Good luck on your journey though. It won't help you.

>. Hence while Scotus and Ockham, like Aquinas, were still interested mainly in human knowledge in so far as it reflected and afforded clues to divine knowledge, in the case of the former two thinkers the ‘pious’ conjecture that God might so dispose things that what appears to humans has no connection to the truly real itself opens the space for the emergence of the modern ‘epistemological’ focus.

>Knowledge is absolute when there is no gap between consciousness and its object, or consciousness is its own object, hence subject and object at once.

>The ouroboros attempting to eat its own tail and complete the circle, but never attaining it.
The absolute closure of gap is of course impossible because there will always be a differential lag in the rates of becoming between our consciousness and our consciousness of our consciousness and our consciousness of our consciousness of our consciousness... and so forth.

>""Knowledge" is a referring back: in its essence a regressus in infinitum. That which comes to a standstill (at a supposed causa prima, at something unconditioned, etc.) is laziness, weariness--"

>Buddhist/Vedantic meditation and other practices only just help enhance that regress... that urge Not To Stop somewhere... they are an intensification of this process for finer and finer self-self-self-self-consciousness... and so you have the phrase mind-Fullness. One tries to achieve the Fullest or maximal consciousness of self.

>The notion "I am Brahman Become", or "That Thou Art", etc. indicate the path of intense regressus where the mind is able to rest on itself De-identifying itself further and further at every stage with passive derivation of its identity from the flux / samsara.

>Meditation is a building of layers. When you have achieved a certain degree of self-consciousness, with further regressus, there is new self-consciousness and so on. So the mind comes increasingly to rest on itself...
self-self-self-self-self-self-consciousness...

>Nibbana or liberation is thus the degree of your self-determination, how mind-Full you can be, how much your identity can disengage with passive identifications or identity being carried away by temporal fluctuations [samsara].

>You could say original Buddhism/Vedanta is a sense-sharpening ontology; the consciousness stands back from itself to observe itself with finer and finer sense, trying to narrow down and close the gap between the differential rates of becoming, which is never achieved. Brahman signifies the infinite potential of that regressus.

>So these meditative practices are a process where that "continuity" in awareness is the least disrupted.

>It is least disrupted when the mind doesn't "stop anywhere". To "cling", to "stop" is to identify somewhere with samsara, a rupture, a gap in the continuity you are trying to close.

>This is actually what is meant in the saying my Buddha-nature is also in the dog or tree which too have their buddha-nature. Pop. buddhism is a corruption of this wisdom calling it compassion and being enlightened. Its not the Nulling of distinction between self and object per se, but not "stopping anywhere" to identify the dog as dog, and tree as tree.... this is an "abstraction"..... which ruptures the continuity of awareness.

reminder for /lit/:
* HIDE ARCHON THREADS

* IGNORE ARCHON POSTS

*DO NOT REPLY TO ARCHON POSTERS

With this system of knowledge being so relevant to so many matters often discussed online, how is one to introduce and expound this philosophy so that others can understand it? It’s necessary to develop Spirit’s awareness of itself, but what is the most efficient way to end the endless debate over loose particulars so that we can all share the common knowledge of the universal, and collectively discuss the important matters that follow from there, such as the ideas discussed in this thread?

>Since life is flux, "stopping" at something is a "clinging", a passivity. Yet, that doesn't mean, you dissolve with the world, rush away with the current, but both the Greeks and Indo-Aryans arrived at taking one's self as self-foundation.

>The Fullness of the mind [mindfulness] is a direction proportion of the Emptiness or de-identification with fluctuations.

>The most solid, abstract Diamond-perfect Mind is actually the most Fluid self that doesn't "stop" anywhere. The Greeks called this kind of intelligence "cunning", or "Metis", because one tried to outwit and close the "gap" between differential rates of becoming and preserve 'continuity' in awareness.

>>11244107
Contribute and try to level with posters like this >>11244102

>>11244116
>t.

>Here's how to think about non-self: as the sum of all vectors of the physical envelope, the convergence of all lines, that by which my phenomenology can be said to be happening "behind my back". In fact, there must be a back - an indissoluble obscurity behind phenomena - for there to be phenomena. There are parallels to draw here to Heidegger's lichtung, where non-self is that in virtue of which I am revealed to myself as my self-revealing. Representations flicker across the center that I am, and the less evolved, more diffuse centers reflexively identify with these representations, meaning their consciousness of some phenomenological property is "internal" to that property as long as they are unable to get outside.

>Mind-fullness is being external to the algorithms of one's representations.

>I recognize an irreducibility in me that is one essence with the insubstantiality of phenomena. All suffering is ignorance, and all ignorance is this nature fleeing from itself. Praxis here is something like a centrifugal self-consolidation: I am most grounded in myself when I am not desperately trying to contract in on some imperturbable, hard kernel of identity. I am most my Self in my relinquishing of any pretense to being a self. The loss of the small self is the gain of independence from it. A negative plenitude.

>>11244126
You fear what you don't understand.

>>11244144
quality post buddy gj try elaborating on your nonsense

>>11244102
There's very little that's out right gnostic here. Why would the archons preach the void? They are slavery to the material universe, not what I think you're confusing as a desire for annihilation. The dissolution of self as the goal of the mysticism is a pretty universal idea.

>>11244166
What are you confused by?

>>11244107
>discuss the important matters that follow from there
such as how to kill all the niggers and bring women back to the kitchen

>>11244169
>The dissolution of self as the goal of the mysticism is a pretty universal idea.
It's common, but hardly universal. More likely you meant the deprivation of worldly self as a means of traveling closer to a metaphysical ideal. One of the walking ways. Aad semblio impera, dela can carpio semblex. The peace of God in the west, and the harmony of non-duality in the east. It's all a joke, dumb laughter is the way out.

And to want to be voided is to want to first be eaten by the world.

>>11244176
Nevermind. You're not smart enough. Don't @ me.

>>11244244
hardly. there is no reified metaphysical ideal.

to want to be voided is to accept you'll always be eaten by the world.

>>11244260
>there is no reified metaphysical ideal.

>>11244272
love is what emerges precisely in the absence of one

or, to the more mystically inclined (and otaku on this site)

>>11244275
Care to extrapolate? I'm approaching this from the Platonic and Catholic view of love as highest object. It exists in the world and presumably as an attribute of God, to give and receive love is to be closer to God. Ergo: Jesus and his ways.

>>11244275
one hundred and first post, best post

>>11244323
counter example: self-love.

one-hundred-and-first-post worst post.

>>11244329
except that narcissistic self-love is almost certainly not what that anon is talking about

also your pants are too tight, receive my derision

>>11244102
based anti-archon poster
I sage this thread.

>>11244351
>almost certainly not
nice weasel words

Anon said "love." I said "self-love." No narcissism about it, just plain simple selfishness. Not necessarily to a deranged degree, just what you call the needs of survival met by an ego. A self. I imagine it is fair to say the One's need was the create, to love and be loved.

>>11243987
>by the look at people like you
Please tell me how you view me negatively so I can improve my image for the future.

>>11244107
You just need to have a basic understanding of the way Being creates the infinite which by necessity creates Being. It is fairly simple and could probably be explained in five minutes if you speak carefully and straightforwardly. What that implies is up for discussion because it gets trickier but the basic logic is fairly simple and irrefutable.

>>11244929
>Being creates the infinite
What? My interpretation is the infinite Nothing creates finite Being.

Something has to be, before anything else is.
The something could have potentially been, theoretically, anything. But this is what is (always has been), so you have to conclude that this is all that could be (yet).
The beginning of all that is (time and space; laws of nature, ala, gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong bros; dark "matter" and dark "energy"; energy and matter; and potentially, life/will/consciousness, a will-power that acts upon reality, warping it). These are all "somethings" opposites of nothing.

You would conclude that pre-big bang reality was just as it is now, dark energy expanding space: the big bang is just a moment when it reached a certain point that made expansion easier (no rules changing), gravity and dark energy are opposites, dark energy just happened to be naturally "more powerful" (or rather: dark energy makes/is space, the more the space = the more space is "created") unless you observe life being a result of gravity, and if you agree life can with "technology" prevent the big-rip and heat-death through practical apotheosis.

TL:DR Dark energy is space, let's say it began at 1, the there was 2 space, 3456789 here there so much space gravity and dark energy become equals (only for a few hundred thousand years) this is where big bang happens, practically a mega massive solid star (everywhere is energy no no real space between particles), then inflation happened and is still increasing exponentially (big-bang isn't a thing of the past, reality still expands faster and faster than ever before in every moment).

What is a few trillion years of our reality, compared to the future of eternity. The entire life of our universe, the-primordial-reality, will be but a second.

>>11245139
If I understand you correctly, you reject the notion that Nothing preceded something?

>>11245053
They complete each other. It is self contained and circular. The infinite creates the finite but it needs the finite in order to be infinite.

>>11245271
I see what you mean, now.

This thread belongs on /x/. That's why it got deleted.
There is no god. Just human mind, imagination and propensity to believe that there's something beyond to escape the existential dread of life's finitude. Get over yourselves.

>>11245337
>There is no god.
Citation needed, you smelly manlet.

>>11245344
>Citation needed
woah stop right there you fucking STEMtard

>>11245352
>Romans 11:32
>For God has consigned all men to disobedience, so that He may have mercy on them all.

GJGE meatsack. Go spout your mentally deficient atheist drivel somewhere else. Bugmen are welcome to come back and talk about metaphysics when they've found their soul.

>>11244368
>nice weasel words

Not really, because being in a position where God's non-existence becomes a spiritual trial automatically precludes you from narcissism rushing in to fill that void. You're just being facetious. The anon you're talking to is absolutely right.

>>11245337
Why is this thread absolutely infested with proles?

>>11245366
can't even understand a joke

>>11244313
>Love is not consolation; love is light.

God is the idea of Himself in the void. Among many others, read Tolstoy.

>>11245337
first sentence yay
the rest nay

bump

>>11245604
>Tolstoy
I've read John and Job and all them, I'm good.

>>11245587
>it was a joke!
Okay brainlet. Keep telling yourself that.

>>11245582
I don't think you understand what is being discussed. Man does not need to be justified to God. And "God's non-existence" is not the question, or even a certainty. Humans are always and constantly fucking up because of their own misapprehensions, God is just the greatest of them.

>>11241855
anyway as for OP's link I think CTMU is a half-assed hack that attempts to fill the gaps with technobabble instead of metaphysics. it's lame and gonna look ridiculous in 25-50 years. like how we see 19th century spiritism.

>>11245965
>Man does not need to be justified to God.

Why would you think this? There is no justification to be made, that's the point. Nothing is justified and everything is infinitely justified.

>>11245965
>Okay brainlet. Keep telling yourself that.
case in point

>All sensation is composed with the void in compositing itself with itself, and everything holds together on earth and in the air, and preserves the void, is preserved in the void by preserving itself.

>It is the empty form of time that introduces and constitutes Difference in thought; the difference on the basis of which thought thinks, as the difference between the indeterminate and determination. It is the empty form of time that distributes along both its sides an I that is fractured by the abstract line of time, and a passive self that has emerged from the groundlessness which it contemplates. It is the empty form of time that engenders thinking in thought, for thinking only thinks with difference, orbiting around this point of ungrounding.

>>11243881
Positing non-being, absence and nothingness = nihilism

>>11246255
What do you think nihilism means?

>>11246255
Not necessarily, 'cause then you're putting yourself in the awkward position of having to argue why Meister Eckhart, Boehme, and Weil were ackshually closet nihilists. Pro-tip: you can't.

God is a reification of Being, nihilism is a reification of Non-being. Mysticism does neither; it's precisely a de-reification of all conceptual structures.

A grasp of Zen emptiness here is crucial.

Don't confuse the majority of the posts in this thread for void worship.

pleroma is a state of undifferentiated nothing

"entropy is the demiurge": the demiurge is the thermodynamic economy of the universe; the intra-determination of flux.

things are certain ways because they aren't other ways: determinatio est negatio

this is the source of everything beautiful and terrible about life, because the Fruit that tempted Adam was the knowledge of both good AND evil. As Montaigne and Nietzsche both intuitively understood: there can be no affirmation or denial of the value of life because life is the field presupposed by all value judgments.

>>11244275
Thank you for understanding. Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy

the conditions of knowledge are such that these conditions eventually seek the knowledge of themselves.

the logos as cephalic cosmic rationality is dead. reason has rolled its eyes into the back of its skull and confused the darkness it sees there for its own nature. hegel understood this process keenly: if, when reason interrogates itself, it finds only an unsurpassable horizon, then reason must be this darkness' self-knowledge.

land understood this too: the eye is the true rationalist organ, it is the organ of representation par excellance, even when we fantasize we see with our "mind's eye".

it is by the eye that consensus reality is most readily established. God is the (eye)n: the eye that collapses non-being into the logic of the Real.

For Hegel God is an eye exists only as it is posited by the brute actuality of vision.

The eye cannot see itself, it sees itself as its seeing.

the two birds of the Upanishads have evolved. now the restless one has attained to some pretense of knowledge, now it wants to understand its sibling that has always watched its movements with a maddening serenity.

as soon as reason glances into the still waters of mind, it upsets them, like narcissus it is beguiled by its own image for being there, enamored with itself for having finally stilled the waters long enough to catch a glimpse of its face, and not the false visage of a god, those phantoms of the psyche.


what has always haunted western thought is the intimation of its own groundlessness. but to investigate this groundlessness is to invite recursion into hallowed ground: this is spirodynamic of capital. with no arch-representation by which the order of images is consolidated - no God to knit together the world into a coherent whole - now this spiraling is self-energizing, self-accelerating.

reason can give up the ur-being but it cannot give up this reifying faculty itself. the need to make images and solid cores out of ephemera. western thought has always suffered from a feeling of vertigo, their disdain for oriental emptiness half-stems from jealousy, jealousy of these little men who don't need a ground under their feet.

>>11244275
absence of one what?

>>11246989
absence of God, of ontological guarantee, of some existent transcendent ideal

the love that depends on these things will always be less exceptional than the one that emerges in their absence

>>11241855

I strongly encourage re-upping of historical links to pruned threads in cases where mods overstep their authority and pull this type of shit, in a direct effort of flouting moderation of 4chan in cases where moderation is itself abused. I encourage you to brainstorm unique phrases or strings of information from the deleted thread, OP, so that the archival link can be posted back ITT for uninterrupted discussion of whatever it was that you were talking about.

I wasn't a participant in the old thread nor do I know anything about the subject under discussion, but there's principles at work here: the principle being that in appropriate circumstances 4chan moderation must be circumvented, made irrelevant, and told its business.

>>11247022
Well they've left this thread alone but took a lot of the momentum out of it, I'm pretty much shitposting by myself. Really frustrating desu

>>11247032

Assuming you're the aggrieved OP (or a sympathetic party/old threadposter), I immediately reiterate my call for you to recall unique textual information from the old thread, something you wrote maybe, which can be used to grab the "deleted" (nothing ever is) thread, for present context.

Are you guys actually discussing Hegel or something else?

>>11247003
That is the love of God, retard.

>>11247046
He's not making much sense.

>>11247046
Well someone was kind enough to repeat the OP here: >>11241908

Not just Hegel, pretty much anyone talking about the ultimate nature of being (and non-being) as they understand it

>>11247059
>That is the love of God, retard.

that's what I'm saying: the love that emerges in the absence of God IS God, can only BE God

>>11247075
[frowning Charlie Brown with a scribble over his head.jpg]

>>11247066

Good, I bet this was the deleted thread. Now, we directly flout 4chan moderation to good effect and continuity of discussion:

>>/lit/thread/S11241396

A little /x/, but certainly /lit/, much moreso than the umpteenth thread about Joyce's penchant for brappers. The point being that the hot pocket chickies are incompetent in this case.

>>11247090
What are you having so much trouble with?

>>11247096
Perhaps too little, too late, but thanks for making the effort.

>much moreso than the umpteenth thread about Joyce's penchant for brappers

kek

>>11247098
Nothing, I understand what you are saying now. It just seemed like a long way to go around it and perhaps you make some assumptions about your experience being universal when, in fact, they are not.

>>11247096
>much moreso than the umpteenth thread about Joyce's penchant for brappers
you have to go back

>>11247104
who said it was supposed to be universal? the void either eats you fucking alive or you find grace vOv

it's why this thread's open. I want to hear from other people's experiences but it's just crickets.

>>11247109
it's just dumb that a thread tangentially related to literature and philosophy gets deleted while subhuman "where can i read book about thing that make me big cummy :D" stay up no problem

>>11247148
What are you thoughts pertaining to the multiverse? Are all possible variations of existence produced since they are possible? Would the Void create universes which don’t allow consciousness to develop? I guess what I’m getting at, does the Void specifically desire the knowledge of itself, or is the knowledge of itself a necessary result of the infinite forms of existence?

>>11246636
Is this supposed to make me feel depressed?

>>11247202
I can't possibly speculate about a multiverse. All I can say is that, what is real and thinkable is real and thinkable, if there's a "real" outside our real then it must necessarily be a part of our "real" if we it is cognizable at all. Follow me? Any "realities" outside reality would be nonsensical. But what do I know about the fucking godhead

>Would the Void create universes which don’t allow consciousness to develop? I guess what I’m getting at, does the Void specifically desire the knowledge of itself, or is the knowledge of itself a necessary result of the infinite forms of existence?

kinda both, where consciousness didn't develop there's no one around to complain about it, ya dig? and where it did, it will always-already be there. i believe the void "naturally" self-polarized and consciousness is both a natural product of this process AND the knowledge that it is JUST a natural process...

>>11247203
what's depressing about it?

>The basic idea behind this hypothesis is that since the universe is composed of equal amounts of positive and negative energy – amounts that cancel each other out – the universe as a whole contains no energy at all. In this way the universe appears to be strangely empty, especially if you consider the fact that matter is a form of energy as well. According to many physicists – ranging from Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking to quantum chemist Peter Atkins – the hypothesis of the zero energy universe explains how the universe could have emerged from nothing, namely, through a kind of 'splitting' of nothing into positive and negative energy.

>"Where did the substance of the universe come from?... If 0 equals ( + 1) + (-1), then something which is 0 might just as well become + 1 and -1. Perhaps in an infinite sea of nothingness, globs of positive and negative energy in equal-sized pairs are constantly forming, and after passing through evolutionary changes, combining once more and vanishing. We are in one of these globs between nothing and nothing and wondering about it."

>>11247222
I pretty much agree, but I’m still having trouble with the idea that any possible world free of contradictions is real. For example, why wouldn’t it be possible for a conscious, powerful entity to precede all other things within that reality? Is it possible for this type of being to come after man in one universe, but before man in the other? If only one of them is possible, then there must be some contradiction somewhere, but I can’t find it at the moment. I prefer a God that is constantly raising its consciousness through time, so that we humans are, in a sense, the fetus of God, made in his image, since we are conscious beings. However, how would God be defined as all-knowing, omnipotent, etc. if he existed first? He must have reached some limit, and since he needed no development to exist immediately, he will need no further development of the mind.

I don’t know where I was going with this, I thought I had something, but I’m pretty tired, so I’ll let you reflect on it.

>>11247398
you could take this a million different directions, but I kinda like Olaf Stapledon's solution (with a touch of Orthodox theology): God is both his eternal fulfillment outside of time, and his self-development immanent to time. It seems like God's telos in time is just a "confirmation" of his perfection in eternity. But Orthodox theology says God is the source of both time and eternity.

So he's not just outside of time as the beginning and end of the process that he is, he is even beyond this also, he stands even outside this schema, as what is eternally fulfilled outside of time and always-already being fulfilled within time.

Hegel thinks of God as something like the recursion of a pure actuality. God is an empty circle; perfect, pure (unconscious) immediacy (Eden), thought is the spiration of this circle, the relating of this immediacy to itself as immediacy (Something Is, therefore Something also Is Not, and boom, the dialectic has begun)

kind of scattershot here. hegel isn't an orthodox theologian. orthodox theologians are not german idealists. hegel denies a transcendent being outside his own process, because God is nothing but his process.


keep in mind, for hegel particularly, contradiction isn't eliminated by God, but PRESUPPOSED by Him

>>11247469
I think we’re using the word God differently. When I say God I simply mean a powerful ruler/creator who has cognition. This seems to be what humans are striving to become, but we think of gods being more metaphysical and unlimited. So I ask if such a powerful being could exist before natural life in one universe, but after it in another universe. Is one actuality more necessary than the other? Is there some contradiction in an ultimate lower existing immediately?

I hope this makes sense

>>11247570
*power

>>11247570
Well it's what I'm trying to say, I don't believe in any personal being with cognition because of how "hands-off" this universe feels, but at the same time the existence of love and this yearning to become God/transcend matter, well, where the fuck did it come from? Is it just matter wanting to get away from itself? Why would that be? Is it the void rejecting itself, and God is the maximal expression of that rejection, of what the primordial state of things "ought" to have been?

I don't think either scenario is more necessary, what I'm trying to communicate is that they kinda entail each other, God both has to pre-exist his movement-to-himself and simultaneously be that process' culmination. Now this isn't Hegel's position exactly, but hey.

>>11247202
The answer is no. The infinite has to collapse into being in order to complete its infinitude. Being is witnessing. Limitation is form. How can that which is outside of being have form? So no there are no empty universes unobserved. All, being is pure witnessing. Yes I am going full idealist.

And no the Void does not have desire. Desire is a characteristic and all characteristics are limiting. In order to be infinite the void must be without characteristics. However the infinite lacks finitude and so it births all being in order to complete itself and paradoxically become truly infinite.

>>11247096
Original OP here. I was really surprised when the original was deleted. It was just starting to heat up. There was a real sense of comradery in the air too.

>>11247570
Yes you are using the word God differently. You mean a personal god with characteristics, the other poster refers to the emptiness as god because emptiness is where all from is birthed from.

>>11247639
>And no the Void does not have desire. Desire is a characteristic and all characteristics are limiting. In order to be infinite the void must be without characteristics. However the infinite lacks finitude and so it births all being in order to complete itself and paradoxically become truly infinite.

very nice hegelian insight you arrived at by yourself. this kinda mutual reduction between the infinite and the finite. the infinite just is the finite, the finite just is the infinitude of its own movement.

>>11247203
Whether or not all of this is depressing is an interesting question. I've had a couple times in my life where I misread or didn't fully investigate some headline online and thought that the world was going to end. That is an incredibly uncomfortable feeling and you immediately start reaching out for answers. One salient feeling was the idea that "I don't really want this thing to end, I want it to continue even if it is't altogether good." What's crazy is that this dialectic ensures the constant and eternal renewal and manifestation of being. You never truly die. The infinite will always collapse into being. The problem is no longer that our lives are finite, for we are reborn. The problem is, how should I live knowing this and what am I to feel about the inevitable nightmarish suffering (and joy) that an infinity of being imposes? One thing worth noting is that you already have an infinity of past lives behind you. So keep that in mind in your evaluation of the situation.

>>11247661
Zizek says Kierkegaard's great insight about despair isn't that the self in despair fears its impending annihilation after death or anything, but that it is wedded to itself for eternity, it can never get away from itself, the true horror isn't oblivion but an essentially functional immortality. An infinite life implies an infinite responsibility.

>>11247676
I don't agree with that. I think death petrifies many people. For many it is insanely hard to grapple with when it is staring them in the eyes. I think the idea that we have responsibility is actually one of the ways we can feel meaning. My actions count for something. It is important that I act for the good of being and there are definite ways of accomplishing this. As far as I'm concerned if an path of responsibility that I found undeniable emerged before me I think my life would feel complete. The mission would be laid out and my task would be set. There would be definite purpose. I think I feel precisely the opposite of Kierkgaard and Zizek. Perhaps I'm missing something though. If you have an elaboration I'd be happy to hear it.

>>11247708
What he's saying is that the person in despair just refuses the responsibility of a self, refuses a fidelity to eternity, instead of living for the momentary gratification of the small self in time. The real terror for the despairer isn't oblivion - he wants nothing more than to not be who he is - but that he is stuck with himself for eternity.

i cant really communicate to you what its like to feel you are your own abductor and kidnap victim, on an ontological level. it's fucking scary. you're right nothing will always collapse into being, the same way sleep always eventually collapses into wakefulness, and that's the horror of it (for some). but I see what you're saying, the only real difference here is just attitude.

i also don't consider infinite development pointless. i believe its just the void evolving to a higher and higher cognizance of its freedom and equaniminity. maybe even Love (which I think is the highest truth) will probably look quaint to the cycles of the "future"

maybe at heat death the information of this universe is somehow absorbed into the background, and the cycle starts again. i hate how new age-y that sounds but ive read something to that effect in a lot of books and papers.

>>11247729
Okay I see what you mean. Despair in the sense that someone who is just absolutely miserable and dislikes everything about themselves and is completely without motivation. They just want their torture to stop, but the pressure of responsibility forbids them so they are trapped in their torture. Having to live with self hatred. And indeed some of these people actually do choose death instead of continued living, that is the extent of their pain. So yes I actually agree with you. There are fates worse than death. Such as perpetual torture, however is may be wrought.

In regards to your last paragraph yes being is eternal. It never ends. Any sort of million years long time gap without being essentially collapses retroactively upon the birth of being. The same way that you do not experience time spent asleep.

>>11247225
I'm not philosophically literate and kind of stumbled into this thread so I apologize if I sound retarded

If "heaven" is cognate with nothingness that makes me think that "heaven" would be boring and that I would crave mortal life and in all its pain and imperfection, but mortal life's pain and imperfection makes me crave "heaven" and so on and so on. I feel like I want to experience mortal life and heaven simultaneously, and not one after another in a linear sequence.

>>11247759
Heaven is not nothing. Nothing is the infinite which births the finite which is being. The way I say it is being partakes of heaven and hell in a constant interplay. When you are having breakfast at a nice cafe with friends laughing over fond memories, cups brimming with coffee and a cheery glow about the faces around you, you are partaking in heaven to some extent. When you are lost and desolate and full of remorse, hell is creeping into your life. Heaven and hell are not special mystical places, they are as real as anything else. They are ways of describing aspects of being. Alan Watts has a good lecture about this, the idea that places often conceived of as being special realms separate from ordinary life are in fact just representations of the way life can manifest.

>>11247750
>tfw you've proven your experiential center is eternal if at least not your soul on 4chan

Yes this is why I think that intimation people have that whatever drove you to suicide will find you again, cuz suicide isn't an escape because there's nowhere to escape "to", the Real is the Real is the Real.

I mean Schopenhauer was completely right: okay, you dissolve into nothingness upon death, nil, zilch, zip, nada, it's over, but if that's the final truth of it, how the fuck did you bootstrap yourself out of that nothing in the first place?

mortalists are partially right, I think the persona goes but the "center" remains.

>>11247781
Well the relief is that upon reincarnation you might be a different sort of being who can tolerate life. So you might escape a heinously miserable life and gain a tolerable one. I don;t know what kind of system or logic might negotiate exactly how the rebirth of your being might go.

I would agree with the mortalists if by center they mean witnessing. Being is witnessing. All form exists by its being witnessed. In fact form and witnessing are identical. So it is easy to conceive that all of the characteristics such as personality, body, and memory would dissolve and new being would emerge. It would be no different than what you see changing as you look around your room.

>>11247759
you sound fine. you know what? this is EXACTLY the issue driving all of Neon Genesis Evangelion. I mean first of all there'll be no "you" to experience the void as barren, empty, unstimulating, because what "you" are IS that void. but because you are that nothing, eventually it'll collapse into something, because it can, because it's Nothing and Nothing has no ruleset. And then when you're born you crave that Edenic unity with the primal womb again... and on the wheel turns. The fundamental tragedy of existence as Schelling says.

We all crave the ground as a release from life but the ground kills everything in us that had any reason to crave it in the first place.

>>11247779
Boehme says Hell and Heaven are not places you go to, but just the full revelation of your inner condition upon death. he also thought every beautiful thing in this world was the literal kingdom of heaven manifesting in the mortal plane

In Orthodox theology, Hell is just the rejection of God's light (the holy void "before" Being), Heaven is its full acceptance. Mysticism is fundamentally a love of the devourer. All things eat in this universe, the void eats the universe.

>>11247795
i worded that awkwardly, the mortalists don't recognize a center or a "witnessing", they think it all goes. of course my persona will go, but my "center" of witnessing will not. it'll eventually collapse the Void into Something again. what's my proof? it already fucking happened.

>>11247801
>every beautiful thing in this world was the literal kingdom of heaven manifesting in the mortal plane

Based.

>>11247826
heh... I guess... Boehme... never read a physics textbook....

im glad people with ur sensibility still exist

>>11247832
We are acculturated these days to be alienated from our own being by physicalist materialist doctrines. The good news is that these doctrines are philosophically naive, fallacious and incorrect which opens the gateway for an understanding of existence that is laden with meaning and possibility.

>>11247856
I agree but I believe there's value in engaging with these perspectives and beating them from the inside. I'll be reading Brassier side-by-side with Dionysius the Areopagite

honestly? it's a city thing. find me a die-hard physicalist living in a cozy little cottage in the French rivieria or something, I dare you

>>11247863
I agree. In fact scientific teaching imbues people with an appropriate skepticism of things which is advantageous. It just needs to be followed through and allowed to erode its own foundations.

I like your city hypothesis. Personal experience testifies in favor.

Interested to know your view on dreams and their possible meaning or lack of one.

>>11247875
Yes. I mean even Aquinas was a borderline-physicalist, but used that as a base to investigate everything that makes physicalism so untenable on its face - universals, the soul, God.

more often than not a philosophy is just the voicebox of the whole complex of conditions that goes into molding a person. like you're telling me his whole disenchantment with the old world just happened to coincide with the rise of industry? like suddenly the foundations of the universe have shifted cuz human beings have electric lighting? go one light year thatta way and ask the rocks floating through the interstellar void what they thought about kant's transcendental turn.

it's just this endless qualification of the same thing, the same thing it's always been...

some people see void and just void (Heidegger), some people see a little farther (or less? I guess that's the question)

>>11247801
>Evangelion
It was actually this scene that influenced my discovery of these ideas

>>11247781
>I mean Schopenhauer was completely right: okay, you dissolve into nothingness upon death, nil, zilch, zip, nada, it's over, but if that's the final truth of it, how the fuck did you bootstrap yourself out of that nothing in the first place?
This sums up what I’ve been thinking. I don’t yet believe in a soul that links all your modes of consciousness throughout time, but I still believe “you” are reincarnated, because “someone” has to fill that body, if that makes sense.

great thread.

>>11248906
Yeah pretty much.

>>11248879
for an anime eva's always punching above its weight class

>This embrace [of Instrumentality] is however far from a soothing or comforting oneness, is a traumatic shock. This resistance, this trauma takes place at two levels. The ego, as the defender of the I, its spin doctor resists this potential loss, this dissolution on the basis of its own existence.

>Yet at the same time, this return to the form prior to the subject is traumatic, because according to Lacan, that oneness and wholeness that the subject eternally seeks to recover never existed in the first place. It is only retroactively fantasized. This is where the Lacanian definition of ideology emerges. Ideology is the narration of solidarity around this loss. It is the naming of an other who is responsible for this loss.

>As the scene shows, human instrumentality is far from harmonious, but instead we see what Hegel refers to as “the night of the world.” A world of partiality, of pure existence, with no essence and not even the fantasy of essence.

>The agent accept the void within themselves and the void without, the fact that there is no Big Other, no ultimate guarantor of meaning, and therefore somehow requilts the social, radically changes what is thought to be possible. Making the once impossible, everyday, ordinary.

>During both of their terms in the madness of human instrumentality, Asuka had called Shinji pathetic, a coward and he had attacked her, almost choking her. After discovering both him and Asuka alone in this brave new world, the Lacanian mantra of love is illustrated all too well, “I love you, but there is something in you more than you, a tiny piece of the real, which is why I must mutilate you.”

>>11248879
>>11250061

>For Lacan, there is no end to this story, it continues on dialectically, the subject absolutely able to change the Symbolic world around is, fundamentally unable to alter the forms of its own constitution. The impossible will happen, things will change, but what we can read from this ending is that the subject cannot. The radical change is always too traumatic for the subject, to close to the means of its constitution. And so while the Symbolic can be radically altered, the split in the subject will always return, along with it, this potential for greatness and its inexorable madness.

there is always being because being can't let go itself, can't take that plunge of absolute erasure

>>11248879
>>11250061
>>11250077
> the very things which give us individuality (a sense of self defined against others) make total understanding and lack of pain impossible. … The Human Instrumentality Project, then, represents this Thanatotic desire to overcome the pain of existence by returning to the imaginary stage before individuality existed. Indeed, Rei later describes the post-Instrumentality world to Shinji in blatantly Lacanian terms, describing it as “an ambiguous world where it is impossible to tell where you end and other people start” (“End”).

> The Human Instrumentality Project creates a state wherein interpersonal conflict and pain do not exist, but does so at the cost of individual existence; indeed, it negates the very conditions that make individuality possible. In this sense, NERV’s solution amounts to little more than “running away” into otaku isolationism, and the manner in which Evangelion proceeds to its conclusion attests to Anno’s agreement.

>Reframing the inevitability of pain as a type of freedom seems to bring him a great degree of existential comfort. Reflecting the Lacanian title of the episode, Shinji finds his identity cannot exist without the ability to compare his view of himself against the discrepant versions of himself existing in the minds of others: “I am nothing but I. I am I. I wish to be I.” In their way, other people are just as central to his personality as he himself.

>In the end, Shinji rejects the Human Instrumentality Project as false, and reaches the same conclusion as Anno: while co-existence brings pain, the only alternative is a grim one – the total dissolution of the self.

>In rejecting a painless loss of identity in favor of defining his own existence at the risk of pain, Shinji has risen above the short-sighted isolationism Anno earlier disparaged.

human instrumentality as the collective withdrawl from samsara, the pain of differentially determined, isolated individuals struggling to navigate and cope with a world that is the very basis of that individuality

absolute selfhood is absolute non-being: the subject is defined by the very core of objectivity that protrudes into it, the ex-timate core, an interiority that is simultaneously an exteriority: what I am the negative space I define, what I am is fundamentally what I am not, what has to exceed me to make me

>tfw Spirit
>tfw you know yourself
feels great m8

to people talking about Eva, watch the superior Utena, I want to be able to talk to some faggots about crossing the abyss by believing you're already on the other side, the use of illusion and fantasy as a means of inspiration to achieve the impossible, the faustian drive to incarnate infinity in a finite creation, stories that are meant to create a self-referential frame of mind in order to awaken the subject, and whatever else, absolutely love that show.

>>11250302
can you talk more about this? maybe make an effortpost? sounds v interesting. only other anime to even touch eva's depth is maaaaybe berserk, and even then the platonic stuff in berserk is more just an afterthough

>>11250559
>maybe make an effortpost
alright I'll give it a shot
here's some songs to accompany this post, watching a few will give you an idea of what the show is covering thematically
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=EAPVwTawBR0
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=E83hl6hDfKQ
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=elG2L2VKSgg
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=hCuS6VBgIjc
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=5ISlt_OTGwY
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=jdsMC6ilA2w
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=boMUy-fI0Ok
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=Ak11WgTr7AM
>only other anime to even touch eva's depth is maaaaybe berserk
Utena is often pitched to people as "Evangelion for girls" to get them interested, and while I would agree with that to a large extent, there are significant differences between the two shows.
Evangelion in my opinion was crafted with a single purpose in mind: to create a subconscious block that causes the subject to avoid suicide, perhaps one of the highest aims a work of art can hope to achieve. (Anno set out to make the viewer identify with Shinji and then reveal a cyclic conflict that has two outcomes; accepting of the self leading to happiness, and rejecting of the self leading to a "disgusting" return to primordial Adam and Eve. Associating the return to the beginning of existence with rejection of the self is where the subconscious block comes in; there was an aversion in my mind at least to having to eternally repeat the same things over and over. This in itself could be a series of posts, but hopefully you get the idea, if you want me to expand on it I can.) The use of repetition as a way of getting the viewer to break out of a cycle is present in Utena as well, which I'll get to in a bit.
If the purpose of Evangelion is to convince the viewer to live, the purpose of Utena is to convince the viewer to become a hero. This is done through an inversion of some of the standard "Prince saves the Princess" tropes; the goal is not for the Prince to save the Princess, but for the Princess to save herself, and subsequently help other Princesses save themselves. From a Jungian perspective I found this more effective at achieving the original purpose of these stories, which is for the man to rescue the princess within, the feminine part of his soul; by portraying the feminine to be active, it is showing that the man does not have to rescue the feminine part of himself, merely teach the feminine part of his soul to save itself (I can only speak about this as a man, women certainly have a different experience that I can't speak to).
I'll continue in a bit, want to make sure the thread doesn't die

>>11250559
>>11251745
"Change your perception of your self, change the world."
>crossing the abyss by believing you're already on the other side
This is a theme which is present in many stories. Harry Potter PoA is one example (Harry does something impossible because he believes he's already done it), if you're interested in understanding more about it here's an audiobook which is based around the same ideas, meant to create a Gnostic awakening (you'll have to be a pretty weird person to even stick with it past the first vid though, I guess it self-selects for real human beans): https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE80D7FD88E490520
So how does Utena pull of that old trick? I'm not going to reveal too much, since it's perhaps one of my favorite aspects of the show, but I'll say that love can impell one to identify with two sides of a gap, and to merge them into one. Part of it relates to possession by a "higher self" (it's literally a prince here), part of it relates to descending into the depths of being, experiencing absolute hopelessness, and then in hopelessness, gaining strength and losing all fear; it's also done multiple times, as many things in the show are.
>the use of illusion and fantasy as a means of inspiration to achieve the impossible
>the faustian drive to incarnate infinity in a finite creation
"The Castle Which Holds Eternity" that will allow the characters to bring about the "World Revolution" is the primary motivating factor for most of the cast; there's some aspect of living a finite existence which is unsatisfactory (as Utena says, "Why do people go on living if they just have to die someday?"). Some of the duelists are looking explicitly for something eternal, one desires a "shining thing" to behold and adore, another one longs for miracles, etc. Attaining eternity is the illusion in this case, and yet it is the drive for that which is impossible that leads to the impossible becoming possible.
>stories that are meant to create a self-referential frame of mind in order to awaken the subject
The story sets up its awareness that its a story in many ways, whether it's the Greek shadow play puppet interscenes, the framing of the screen by a gate with flowers, the recognition that the viewer is searching for the meaning of symbols, amongst other things.

This is a pretty broad level overview of these topics, but I can go further in-depth on most of this stuff. There's other parts of the show that inspire me, such as the insistence on maintaining a nobility of spirit as one ages, the repetition of descending into the self and failing (repetition of failure is used as a means to create a different outcome), the general romantic French aesthetic. More than any of that though is that the show gives the viewer a key and tells tries to teach them to free them from the limitations their mind has placed on reality, which is the main reason why I love this show. That's not even really covering the ending, which deals more with memory.

>>11251745
>>11251894
Well you got me into Utena, definitely gonna check it out. Thanks bud. Jungian animas, the impossibility of transcendence that guarantees transcendence, the longing for the "shining thing"...

and that Malkovian Bible, hah, that shit is crazy, I've seen it before. its almost like a weird internet anima... angel... thing... what a world. gnosis is everywhere, you just gotta look for it

Want to thank all the anons in this thread, a lot of this stuff has resonated with things I've been thinking about lately

>>11252430
Like? contribute ree

>>11252430
I'm glad this shit took off. Still no clue why the original thread was deleted.

>>11252456
I'm >>11247203 and >>11247759 , if those count as contributions

Can't say I'm any happier but it's comforting to know other people (and people smarter than me) have this stuff on their minds

>>11252475
ooh ok, I was more like just tryna get this thread to be more active than getting on your case. glad you enjoyed it anon

>>11252484
s'all good my dude

every sentient being is an organ/extension spontaneously made by the world to understand itself
the goal is to break the chains to that world that needs to constantly create and destroy [things] ultimately leading to nothing, accompishing only a greater need to understand itself further. as you can see, this process is fully interdependent and never ending
when you realize this truth you take the first step to going beyond the limitation this system has and eventually reach unbinding
this is basically my faint understanding of hegel plus my humbly larger understanding of buddhism

>>11252518
>when you realize this truth you take the first step to going beyond the limitation this system has and eventually reach unbinding

this is essentially Hegelian absolute knowing

congrats, you understand hegel better than (apparently) deleuze

>>11252524
i still don't fully understand a lot of things and disagree with some others though. mainly the almost obsessive use of God, specifically the christian God. it's kinda hypocritical and even deluded to reduce the whole hegelian problem to his understanding of a christian god. this obviously conflicts with the buddhist point of view which i hold very dear.
some other statements which i still can't make strong arguments for are the necessity of a goal and the definition of "the world" if we don't equate it with a God or some permanent, perfect essence/nature.

>>11252598
hegel's got a pretty weird relationship with christianity. his God is not outside creation, it just is creation's self-knowing. also he thought the Fall was a good thing... or at least that serpent didn't lie

>some other statements which i still can't make strong arguments for are the necessity of a goal and the definition of "the world" if we don't equate it with a God or some permanent, perfect essence/nature.

yeah i mean once you accept the infinite needs the finite to be the infinite stuff, it's still up in the air whether the finite just putters around forever or is actually developing towards something

>>11251894
need more in-depth utena talk for those of us who've seen the show
finished it a few weeks ago, absolutely wild

>>11252763
seconding this, go nuts. mickey mouse, the simpsons, anime, lacanian psychoanalysis, hegelian ontology, gnostic cosmogonies, christian apophasis, zen mu, kabbalistic metaphysics, anything goes itt desu

keep it alive boys, i'm going to bed

>>11252763
Well if there's anything you want to talk about it I'm down, I don't want to direct the conversation about it too much.
You might be interested in ohtori (dot) nu/analysis
bunch of essays on there in different categories, many are surface level or fanfic-tier, but there's some insights scattered

Personally I'm not someone that's too fond of trying to figure out what individual symbols mean, I'll pick up on some things consciously and other aspects will bias my perception in ways that I'll realize in retrospect.
That said, a few that are critical:
The egg, a cosmic shell, the border between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world.
The castle, eternity, an unreachable ideal, illusion, infinity.
The framing gate, the border, the stage where the play of the show takes place
The academy, adolescence, a temporary haven that one stays at until "growing up"
Now, a few things about the title, some of which is obvious, some of which might not be immediately: A revolution is part of a cycle, but generally one will have more information and knowledge after one than at the beginning; a new synthesis raising the original to a higher condition.
There really are two Revolutionary Girls, Anthy, and Utena; the way the story ends implies Anthy will try to save Utena in the same way she was saved. But the interesting part about that is with the memory of Utena gone, did she ever REALLY exist? In which case, Utena was nothing more than an illusion inspiring Anthy to grow up and become independent, same as the castle is to the other duelists. (Watch the opening again with this in mind, Utena and Anthy are spinning together at the beginning, whereas it's only Utena spinning at the end; the rotating flowers are generally associated with the framing gate, the signifier that you're watching a play, a story, that what you're seeing isn't real) This idea has been transmitted in various ways; it's also in that audiobook I linked. It's the idea that a fantasy, an illusion, or a dream can cause someone to realize the nature of their own existence, and that by dreaming about an illusion, one can make the illusion effectively real (pic related). There is no reason to fear crossing a gate that is opened from both sides at once by yourself, and that is the idea I think the show is trying to get across. If you identify your "self" with what "is," then you've reached the other side, death is nothing to fear, and all that is important is the complete liberation of your "self."
This is corroborated even in the name and behavior of Akio/Dios/Lucifer; Lucifer as enlightenment, as light-bringer, or Lucifer as deceiver, as hallucination? I claim its both, that the tricks of the light are illusory, but they lead to a true realization.

>>11253003
>>11252763
oh, meant to add one more thing, just to clarify
"Smashing the world's shell" in this case would mean destroying the border between the noumenal and phenomenal, the essence of the gnostic realization

“When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one, so that the male will not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in the place of a likeness; then will you enter the Kingdom.” - Gospel of Thomas
(The first part is elaborating on the destruction of the perceived duality, the latter part of that is describing the formation of the astral body through what people call the "imagination")

bump

>>11253003
>>11253031
great posts, can you elaborate on this?

If you identify your "self" with what "is," then you've reached the other side, death is nothing to fear, and all that is important is the complete liberation of your "self."

most traditionalists say its de-identification with the self that conquers death, but i get what you're saying, recognizing your self is not apart from that-which-is, i think.

there's a line in Knight of Cups where Rick's talking about his dream, and he says (though the subtitles will disagree with me, i find this interpretation more evocative) "I was a door I was afraid to go through"

either way I'm gonna start utena today. thanks bud.

>>11254111 (checked)
you basically have it
identifying self with what is, both sides of the phenomenal and noumenal, dissolving the borders of the individual mind => becoming a God-Man/Man-God
"Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?" - John 10:34
>you've reached the other side, death is nothing to fear
it's the same things mentioned further in the thread; you are not the limited individual solely
>all that is important is the complete liberation of your "self."
This is perhaps the most interesting part of what I said; for some, consciousness does not want to discover itself, it wants to remain immersed in the dream. various societies have given different answers in regards to this question, some eugenics, some preventing voting of these individuals, others trying to limit the influence they have to varying degrees of success
it's a conflict between those focused on the material and those focused on the spiritual
is it possible for all beings to align with one or the other? a question for the utopians and eschatologists.
>most traditionalists say its de-identification with the self that conquers death
two paths with somewhat different (or identical, depending on your perspective) outcomes
RHP is dissolution within God/All that is, LHP is separation/branching from All
is your goal to rejoin God, or to change God in some fundamental way? Is it even possible to be separate? I have a hunch as to the answers, but I think everyone should figure those out for themselves.
>recognizing your self is not apart from that-which-is
yes, and this includes all aspects of existence
>either way I'm gonna start utena today.
enjoy senpai

temporarily derailing the thread for the sake of its long-term survival.

Anyone read xianxia? apart from it's nature as a shitty form of lit in its present incarnation, I Eat Tomatoes plays with an idea in Coiling Dragon, that of exploring the Way of things in order to Ascend. Anyone have any recommended readings re: sacred texts that explore similar themes?

>>11254380
>RHP is dissolution within God/All that is, LHP is separation/branching from Allis your goal to rejoin God, or to change God in some fundamental way?

I don't like the RHP, it's basically an ecstatic return to the void-womb. There's something obscene about this world existing just so it can experience the ecstatic liberation of non-existence (though there's ample evidence this is exactly the case)

>>11254763
I haven't heard about it, but which themes are you talking bout exactly?

>We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence.

>"I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. Nor do I ask; I do not care. I create phenomena in swarms, and paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. Do not say, "Draw the curtain that I may see the painting." The curtain is the painting.

>>11255060

Understanding the (((Way))) of the elements, how they fit together, eliminating their contradictions. Is this alchemy? Another book by the same author, by the title "Stellar Transformations," runs in the same vein but the knowledge gained can be applied by manipulating the dantian and the way it interacts with elements. The protagonist ends up creating his own universe and becomes a Creator God.

Look, i'm not saying i'm taking this shit literally, but in that genre there is a common theme of becoming one with the world in order to separate yourself from it, and become some sort of transcendent figure no longer bound by those the Laws of the Universe.

The Kybalion talks about higher-entities, and i'm wondering if there's any commonality between this shitty chinese fiction niche and any real-world spiritual practices?

>>11257461
>Look, i'm not saying i'm taking this shit literally, but in that genre there is a common theme of becoming one with the world in order to separate yourself from it, and become some sort of transcendent figure no longer bound by those the Laws of the Universe.

there's very tantalizing hints this is the case. first, with the concept of CHIM in the Elder Scrolls. second, Shestov (an obscure Russian existentialist!) seems to suggest this is actually what happens. Evola, the Traditionalists. Crowley. The fact that death is a return to the divine abyss of potentiality. It's really crazy fucking shit and I don't know what to make of it.

What you've just created is one of the most insanely idiotic threads I've ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent dime store Alan Watts response were you close to anything that could be considered enlightenment.

I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your souls.

>>11257532
hella fricking epic

>>11257532
You have to be more specific than that. You obviously lack understanding, so seek it out and instead of judging those who do understand.

Bump

bump

bump

>>11260463

let dead things die

something big happened with Descartes. descartes represented perhaps the first time thought retreated into the castle of its own sovereignty, with the cogito did thought discover the intelligibility of the world lay within itself. descartes rejected Aristotle's claim that all knowledge was derived from the senses; he didn't believe there was an external rational order that the mind passively modeled. reason overcame the scholastics with one thing: radical skepticism, the incongruity of mind and nature, the incommensurability of their orders, which meant that intelligibility couldn't lie on the side of nature, but cognition. the teleological worldview was abandoned, only what the mind clearly perceived (mechanism) could count as truth.

descartes was wrong to think he was clearing the epistemological air. to doubt everything is, conversely, to affirm only that which can doubt, and only that which is undoubtable - mechanistic cause and effect.


kant developed this further, in his own way. kant rejected metaphysics to break out of the rationalist - empiricist impasse: metaphysics - questions of freedom, God, the soul - were only ever thought's interrogation of its own limit. and because thought was deploying the very schemata the grounds of which it was trying to uncover, obviously this would lead to contradictory results, the same way our models break down when trying to understand t = 0. t = 0 in the Kantian system is the noumenal realm. it was better if the mind just worried about what was right in front of it.

now it was no longer question of cognition as the mirror of a theologically grounded intelligibility external to it, but cognition was precisely that which made intelligible in principle. the mind doesn't receive objects as they are, the mind receives objects as it must receive them, because it is a mind.

thought is essentially recursion. a spiraling-inwards on itself: it was only natural sooner or later cognition would try to understand the very conditions that constitute it as cognition in the first place.

descartes: thought is the field of its own intelligibility; anything external that doesn't arrive with the same irrefutable epistemological guarantee as the cogito can and must be doubted. the rational mind is the perceiver of intelligible forms, lord and castle both.

kant: even the self-satisfaction of the cogito must be dismantled. there is no substantial thinker with private access to intelligible forms, these forms are only intelligible because cognition must necessarily be structured that way to be cognition. first, reason is no longer on the outside, but only on the inside, and then kant swoops in to say, even this reason is always-already transcendentally structured "behind our back" (t = 0) to be reason. we have no "claim" on it, it had to be what it is. it is, in a sense, totally groundless. reason is essentially the coherence of the synthetic faculty. and so the straitjacket tightens.

>>11261901
Based

>>11261901
confirmed best board

kant wanted to have his cake and eat it too: what is outside thought is essentially unknowable, but what is knowable is how this outside is represented (represents itself?) to us. kant intimated the nothingness of the world and nothingness of our conceptuality but couldn't go all the way: what for him was still rock-solid ground were the a priori schemata of representation that all cognition adhered to and made use of. a bare formality. content was arbitrary, is arbitrary, but the form of this content must be universal and changeless if it is always to be content.


cognition's noumenal limit is rendered impassable by the very structures that exist to understand it: this was kant's great unspoken insight, and what eventually hegel ran with.

if thought can think t = 0, then it must be, in some sense, the 0 thinking itself. the constant thinking and appropriation of a limit as Mind. pure negativity: Spirit. in a way hegel wanted to rescue thought from the clutches of its mechanistic bias, throw open the shutters on the musty cartesian cogito and the maddeningly unknowable = x's of the kantian transcendental realm. a return to a vision of the world as the blooming of God.

but hegel just tied the noose tighter: if thought is only ever its tarrying with its limits, then the absolute is only the immanent self-propulsion of thought. in other words, God is just the Sense that appropriates the = x to its own Sense. God is a circle in 0. God as the external gaurantor is dead forever, God is the tautology of Sense, the infinite articulation of simple sense-certainty.

it was hegel who described the circle, it was nietzsche and schopenhauer who did everything in their power to recognize the power of the Outside. but that's a story for another day

cogito ergo sum is the vomit of western thought
it fucked up everything and is the reason everything is so shit right now

>>11262320
pretty much, though descartes was obviously no dummy. hindsight's 20/20 after all. we're probably getting locked into ways of thinking now that are totally natural to us but might just be digging the hole further (maybe this entire thread is like that, who knows, just try to be as self-aware about these things as absolutely possible)

>>11262336
i'm not sure
to me, this whole discussion was already solved centuries ago with Nagarjuna's thought and the development of sunyata (emptiness)

>>11262398
it certainly was, if you ask me Zen cracked it hundreds and hundreds of years ago, the rest of Western thought is just playing catch-up. or to be more precise, western thought is taking the long and scenic route to the same destination: the need to dissolve discursive structures

>>11262417
>western thought is taking the long and scenic route to the same destination: the need to dissolve discursive structures

i agree with this. it assembles with one hand what it disassembles with the other, but the dissolution you are referring to is way more interesting than the assembly atm

>>11262659
it is, if you've already woke to it. western philosophy is just the task of constructing an extremely complicated EXIT sign, and the bells and whistles are there to convince you of the necessity of leaving. the east is just the EXIT sign, period.

to run with that: western thought is the guy interrogating the arrow wound.

we want to know why it hurts, and how the medicine works, before we take it

>>11262702
i hate pagans

unrelated: there is no wound or medicine

>>11262710
at the absolute level there isn't. the wound is created by the need to heal a wound.

>>11262710
protip: it doesnt really matter if there is or isn't a wound and a medicine, the problem lies in taking the wound to mean something entirely different than it actually is (or isn't), same goes for the medicine
what i'm saying is what all anons in this thread have been repeating ad nauseam: the wound implies the medicine and viceversa. getting caught up in this cycle is the actual problem that needs to be escaped/understood/seen

>>11262735
there is no distinction between relative and absolute but you’re basically otherwise correct anon
>>11262740
>protip
didn’t read learn to talk to people like a human not a journobot

@11262749 (You)
>didn’t read learn to talk to people like a human not a journobot

>>11262749
>there is no distinction between relative and absolute but you’re basically otherwise correct anon

I mean yeah but for the sake of discussion let's just implicitly assume the other guy knows this.

>>11262740
>what i'm saying is what all anons in this thread have been repeating ad nauseam: the wound implies the medicine and viceversa. getting caught up in this cycle is the actual problem that needs to be escaped/understood/seen

it's through understanding their mutual implication that a way out can be discerned. I mean hegel knew this, spirit exists as just the urge to not to be itself, Spirit, if you really wanna get down to it.

>>11262789
there is no such thing as Spirit anon, idk why you people pretend to understand zen and then run off to go make autistic clockwork diagrams. totally extraneous, just leave the childish pretensions to knowledge with academia and the public. there is nothing to know or find out, there is no wound, there is no medicine there is no difference between absolute and relative and there is no Self or Spirit, or Force or Will or anything like that.

>>11262802
you're not understanding what hegel means by Spirit, there is Spirit because there is discursion, Spirit is discursion (its knowledge of itself as such), the rest is the Void, or really there's just the Void turning in on itself. all these things only have a conventional existence

>>11262802
sorry, but you seem a little defensive
i agree that all those concepts you listed are not what people make them to be, that's what i meant in >>11262740, but saying "there is no this" and "there is no that" is the same than saying "there is this" and "there is that"
i'll continue with a strictly buddhist point of view in this
anatta is best translated as not-self rather than no self, please make sure you understand this and then review your claims
you are still getting caught up in the cycle of being vs non-being. craving for becoming and non-becoming are two of the three origins of dukkha according to the pali canon. in this case, you are indulging in craving for non-becoming.
the point is going beyond the dichotomy

>>11262870
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/notself2.html

>>11262823
there is no void and discursive logic is debased its not salvagable and Hegel affirms the existence of a Geist you can equate it with void but it is an eidolon you won’t escape with your pet philosopher.
>>11262870
im not a buddhist, Zen masters used to humiliate and physically assault buddhists to instruct their students. i reject everything you’re saying there is no difference between buddhas and enlightened beings or samsara and nirvana or this and that or YOU and Me, there is no YOU and there is no outside and inside. If you want me to be perfectly frank you’re both basically not ready or capable of fathoming it.

>>11262883
>im not a buddhist
then why are you using buddhist arguments or anecdotes? do you really understand what they actually meant?
>there is no difference between buddhas and enlightened beings or samsara and nirvana or this and that or YOU and Me, there is no YOU and there is no outside and inside
i never said the contrary, in fact, sunyata is that same claim formulated in a buddhist way. samsara is not different than nibanna, they are both equally empty. i already referred to Nagarjuna's thought as basically the solution of this discussion

>>11262883
I use hegel as a tool to understand thought as self-recursion, he's not my pet nor is the process salvageable. and it's only a void from within reflective thought itself. thought creates the outside it interrogates

we both understand what you're saying but the whole point of the thread is how conventional truth can communicate the incommunicable

>>11262883
m8 i cant make out what you even believe

Nothing loves us.

>>11257622
>you lack understanding
fake gnostics pls go

>>11263524
please expound your thesis

>>11263862
he won't but I hope im wrong

>>11263885
I wasn't going to because the anon I'm replying to is a vain idiot but you've shamed me into it. Pearls before swine, away!

>>11263862
*Expound upon, or expand. Expound your is incorrect.

Greek philosophers and Gnostics held that, with enough knowledge, man could become divine. Those who lacked gnosis, who were ignorant of the mysteries, were as though already dead. That's why when you chastised what's-face for lacking knowledge, I called you a fake gnostic. Because you don't know what you're talking about and are just spewing a mishmash of incongruous theology. You are the last person to be teaching what is correct or not.

I'm not the other anon you're replying to btw. Just equally appalled by this thread.

>>11263931
>*Expound upon, or expand. Expound your is incorrect.

>verb (used with object)
to set forth or state in detail: to expound theories.
to explain; interpret.
>verb (used without object)
to make a detailed statement (often followed by on).

>Contemporary Examples
>Why, in an otherwise tough interview, he didn't ask Netanyahu to expound the distinction is beyond me.
>He recognized me from TV, and began to expound his political opinions.

why make yourslef look like an obnoxious shitter when you can refrain from it?
>with enough knowledge, man could become divine
don't know about the other anons who have replied in this thread, but the point was never to become divine. "divinity" is a the misunderstanding of the nature of the everlasting dialectic process of beings trying to interpret themselves and the world around them.
>Those who lacked gnosis, who were ignorant of the mysteries, were as though already dead.
what's wrong with that statement?

>>11263931
>Because you don't know what you're talking about and are just spewing a mishmash of incongruous theology.

Are these your pearls? If you're put off by people drawing from a wide variety of sources I don't know what to tell you. That's just silly. Might as well get mad at Deleuze for writing about both Leibniz and Nietzsche. Apply yourself.

>>11264010
I'm impressed by your certitude, but your actual reasoning such as it is has left me wanting.

>divinity is really a dialectic process of beings
You are so wrong I don't know how to make you right. Put Merleau-Ponty aside, you're not ready for him. Start with the Greeks.

>>11264073
>divinity is really a dialectic process of beings
i never said that though
divinity is a MISUNDERSTANDING of the ACTUAL nature/process of beings
this process is the never ending relationship of the self with its environment, always trying to make sense of it while in fact this same process is exactly what makes both the self and its environment come about
i still haven't read a single argument from your part though, miss me with the bullshit please

>>11263487
accept sithrak

>>11264129
>backpedaling this hard
Yeah, I understand what you're saying. I just don't see you proving it.

Out of curiosity what are your religious beliefs if any? You strike me as a secular humanist trying to wrest theology from religion, and not having the first clue of how to do it.

>i still haven't read a single argument from your part though
I still haven't either. And this is your thread, presumably. You've had 254 posts to make yourself clear and instead you've been jacking off on the board. Here's your (You).

>>11264145
He's not the OP. I'm the OP. His argument is textbook Hegel, you should be able to recognize it.

I've made myself clear to the people who I've made myself clear to. Don't assume incomprehension on your part is a flaw in the argument. And im only saying that because "y-youre not being very clear" is only what people who don't understand what's being communicated but still want to shit on it anyways say

>>11264145
>Out of curiosity what are your religious beliefs if any?
irrelevant, unless you are trying to pull the ad hominem which you obviously are. i don't care though
>You strike me as a secular humanist trying to wrest theology from religion
i don't know, maybe i am? why do you think that?
and yeah, i'm not OP

>>11264183
>i don't know, maybe i am? why do you think that?
well one because you said (misunderstanding or not) reality is a dialectic of beings plural. you said it quite definitively. this requires rejecting Aquinas' arguments and indeed the idea of a One God entirely. you're attempting to explain the intersection of self and reality, like Hegel, but using inadequate earthly terms only. being inclusive enough to count only the non-metaphysical shows an empiricism and rejection of faith (and Christ) that quite honestly makes me gag. my keyboard is covered in bile right now. and i'm not going for any ad hominem. this isn't wikipedia and you're not important enough to insult. untwist your BVDs.

>>11264168
can you please explain your thesis in a sensible paragraph?

Tell me is any of the pseudfaggotry above worth reading

>>11264232
No.

>>11264210
>this requires rejecting Aquinas' arguments and indeed the idea of a One God entirely
yeah, i categorically disagree with the idea of God as I said here >>11252598
>you're attempting to explain the intersection of self and reality
>but using inadequate earthly terms only
how the fuck is using earthly terms to explain the intersection of equally earthly things inadequate?
>my keyboard is covered in bile right now
somehow you think it's civilized to type with a bile covered keyboard that's an analogy btw
>>11264232
it's worth participating in

>>11264210
>can you please explain your thesis in a sensible paragraph?

the absolute is pure negativity, pure difference with itself. thought is the negation of immediacy, and what mysticism and all the great spiritual traditions preach is ultimately the negation of thought, of the discursive structures that underpin an illusory self and reify conceptuality. all determinate things are self-contradicting for being determinate - they are x because they are not y - and this contradiction is consummated in death. apophasis isn't identification with some positive state as much as it is de-identification with inherently limited modes of being. there is no Spirit, there is no Ground: Spirit is what knows this.

>>11252598
>>11264252
>buddhist point of view which i hold very dear
UGH. are you the same person who was shilling Mulamadhyamakakarika here the other month?

Anyway. I'd ask you to tell me what you think God is, and especially what you think the "Christian God" is, but that you make that distinction tells me you can't. Read Aquinas. Study the Bible. Catholic theology is much much more subtle than you think. You don't understand the terms, and have rejected them out of hand.

>how the fuck is using earthly terms to explain the intersection of equally earthly things inadequate?
>Creation and existence
>earthly
wojak_eyeroll.jpg

You are beyond persuasion. Expect miracles.

>>11264270
Thanks. I agree with most of this, not that it matters. But it seems an awfully sharp sword, and could easily be turned to evil. It lacks the leviathan Christ, and is wholly unconcerned with ethics. The part I disagree with is the first sentence: the absolute (presuming you mean God, or All) is not proved to be negativity itself. Only that negativity is a way to imagine it.

>All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
Old boy JS Mill comes to mind, and he might agree with your language-holocaust. But what purpose could it serve except rejecting divine studies altogether?

>>11264308
>are you the same person who was shilling Mulamadhyamakakarika
that was not me
>You don't understand the terms, and have rejected them out of hand.
sure, and you still can't make the effort to explain what they actually mean according to you. i won't deny i could use a better understanding of abrahamic religions but that's not my main goal right now

>Creation and existence
>earthly
seriously? you think the mind is separate from the body too right? for me, you are the one with the limited point of view.
how can this body be anything else other than earthly? how can the world that we experience through the senses (the mind/intellect is another sense by the way, it has the same nature as the touch, the vision, etc) be anything other than earthly? let's not take child tales as absolutes truths, let's take what we have right now right here rather than start conjecturing about some permanent, perfect being ruling the world shall we?

>>11264331
Okay, cool, reasonable response. Certainly calling it "negativity" or "void" reifies it too much, adds some unsavory Hegelian or otherwise edgelord connotations. All I'll say is I like Orthodox negative theology, gonna go with that.

And one more caveat regarding ethics: I will call God whatever principle is responsible for love and beauty in this world (any strict appeal to material causes only makes them more inexplicable) and ESPECIALLY that love that emerges in the wake of this realization, of the nullification of all conceptuality etc. etc.

Christ is also important but complicated. Anyways you were reasonable and didn't respond with a smug shitpost. Cool.

>>11264355
>let's not take child tales as absolutes truths, let's take what we have right now right here rather than start conjecturing about some permanent, perfect being ruling the world shall we?

please respond with detail to this, I have an affinity for both Kierkegaard and Hegel, and struggle to understand faith relative to the dialectic, since both these guys make so much sense to me

>>11241908
This has to be the most mental burgeois horse shit I’ve ever read. Congratulations.

>>11264358
>I will call God whatever principle is responsible for love and beauty in this world
my man Platonist Union #642 outta Little Chute Wisconsin represent!

>Christ is also important but complicated.
Agreed. Wholly man, wholly God. Hypostatic union. Then take on knowledge of the attributes of God, including impassibility and simplicity to start. It's a lot to ask, after just believing in the mythos in the first place. Fr. Barron had an interesting thought on this I think: too often people are asked to follow catechism before they are fully evangelized. This is what drives too many people, especially young people, away from the faith. They don't understand it, or worse they understand a dumbed down voodoo Catholicism. They reject it and go for buddhism or something like our friend here.

>Cool.
You're cool.

>>11264355
>>11264355
>that was not me
Okay good because that book is shit. It's a translation, sure, but its arguments are vague and likely only to hook vitamin-deprived hippie vegans.

>how can this body be anything else other than earthly?
you aren't a body, you're a soul. a nitwit soul apparently, made earthly by blame and trauma.

>let's take what we have right now right here
the absolute hubris of this statement. grubby empiricist hands all over everything and rejecting grace.

>>11264408
>rejecting grace
Not everyone’s received it. Romans 9. You can’t blame someone for not believing in something when they have no good reason to.

>>11264424
Not blaming him for that, just his hubris. Romans 11:32.

>For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

>>11264436
Honestly you’re the one being aggressive making claims of truth, while he’s trying not to take something as true which hasn’t been demonstrated yet, at least to him.

>>11264408
>you aren't a body, you're a soul. a nitwit soul apparently, made earthly by blame and trauma
bullshit, that's what i meant by child's tales. you are just arbitrarily separating body and soul, making them exclude each other.
>the absolute hubris of this statement
seriously? stop have delusions of grandeur
>rejecting grace
right, i'm a heretic, burn me at the stake!

anyway though, so sad to see this thread turn into a christian vs non christian drama

>>11264384
good stuff. if you can recommend any books/articles on thomistic responses to orthodox objections (like the filioque or reduction of divine impassibility and simplicity to the economic trinity), and vice versa, go nuts. also, any scholastic responses to hume and descartes. they're the ones who got this shitball rolling

and i agree teenage atheists are a product of incomprehension and not ny real struggle with faith. but it takes two to tango, fundies should learn how to compellingly communicate and defend their religion at a high level. find me a fundie who says "hypostatic union" and I'll eat my shoe

op here. im gonna hit the sack. i imagine this'll hit bump limit by morning. i might make a new thread. just mysticism/religion/philosophy general i guess, with the CTMU stuff in the OP to give it a little structure. there's been a lot of good stuff itt

>>11264445
I make no claims to truth, or infallibility. I profess only my own faith and philosophical beliefs.

>>11264446
>delusions of grandeur
Reverse that, but first define your terms. What is 'right here' and 'right now'. You're gonna hit back with what is merely observable, okay? And then I'm going to say you lack the instruments to detect God. Call it ingratitude: literally a lack of recognition of divine love. It's okay. You're okay.

>right, i'm a heretic, burn me at the stake!
Nah. You'll find faith eventually. Faith in God begins with merely accepting the notion that the universe exists, and that it was created, and finally the inevitibility of a creator.

>>11264449
>filioque
On this I can only say go back to the Hellenic source and examine Plotinus and compare terms and try to make them fit in the trinity and see what shakes out. I've been on a Bible tear for a minute and need to go back and read P-Dad myself.

>>11264504
i honestly don't want to continue this discussion with you. you'll keep trying to push your presumption of God into me and i'll keep trying to push my rejection of it into you. this will lead nowhere.

>I make no claims to truth, or infallibility
>You'll find faith eventually. Faith in God begins with merely accepting the notion that the universe exists, and that it was created, and finally the inevitibility of a creator
yet your God is infallible, perfect, permanent; yet you say with absolute certainty that everyone will eventually reach the conclusion of God and take your faith. see what i mean by delusions of grandeur? i'm not insulting you, i'm just frustrated.

>What is 'right here' and 'right now'. You're gonna hit back with what is merely observable, okay?
it would seem like that to you indeed. but that's not entirely true. know that i'll adhere to buddhism now (at this point this discussions is basically theological/religious). right here right now obviously means your immediate experience of "yourself" and of "others" and "other things". you experience them through the senses, through six senses -namely ear, eye, nose, tongue, body and mind. you would take mind to be separate from the other senses and call it the instrument through which you can reach God. that's wrong, blatantly wrong. your experience of God is determined by all the factors that determine the other senses. it's a delusion.
using the word immediate does not mean "what's merely observable". don't strawman me

i think you feel that by saying all this i'm rejecting love and everything that's good. that by saying all this i'm justifying hatred and everything that's wrong.
that is not my objective nor do i substantiate that claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theologians

>>11264455
i wouldn't push it, wait a couple of days before making another thread

Bump for op

>>11265843
I would let this die, I'll make a new thread in a couple days