seeds wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 6:10 pm
...you have managed to interpret the “I AM-ness” of God as having no more of a personal identity or self-awareness than that of the flavor of an apple.
AlexW wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2020 1:05 am
Yes. Exactly.
What we call "flavour of apple" is God (besides "seeing the color red","feeling the wind on the skin" or "a thought about pink unicorns").
The statement could have been reduced to "I am that AM" or "I am that I" or "I am BEING" or "I am REALITY" - but this would be even harder to understand, wouldn't it?
Gospel of Thomas 77b: "Split wood, I am there. Lift up a rock, you will find me there."
Yes, and the exact same thing expressed by Thomas would also apply to Berkeleyan Idealism, wherein because the entire universe is the literal mind of God, then every material phenomenon therein would be formed from the living fabric of God’s very being. Therefore, wherever one probes into the essence of universal matter, one will find the presence of God.
However, if you will just include the fact that the Bible also asserts that humans (more specifically, the human mind and soul) are created in the image of God,...
(thus some of what we are can be turned around and applied to God in certain limited ways)
...then you will realize why it is logical to conclude that God also possesses an individual, self-aware, Cartesian “I Am-ness” (just like we do).
Now if you doubt that (which I am sure you do) then file your complaint with this guy:
And furthermore, just as our own “I Am-ness” exists above and outside of the fabric of our thoughts and dreams, likewise, so does God’s “I Am-ness” exists above and outside of the fabric of universal matter,...
...which upon closer inspection is simply an extremely advanced and ordered version of the same fundamental (holographic-like) substance from which our own thoughts and dreams are constructed - as is depicted in one of my fanciful illustrations:
seeds wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 6:10 pm
And that it was “undirected love/bliss/and happiness” that Moses was afraid to look upon?
AlexW wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2020 1:05 am
Yes, he was afraid to look at this “undirected love/bliss/and happiness”. Why? Because it is void of individuality. Because it swallows the "you" and leaves no trace but “undirected love/bliss/and happiness” (without a "you" being happy).
Do you have any idea of how ridiculous that sounds?
Of how ridiculous it is to imply that something “you-less” (i.e., something that doesn’t seem to possess any fixed or central means by which to process sensory information) could somehow experience love/bliss/and happiness?
Yeah, yeah, I get it. It only sounds ridiculous to someone who has not experienced the true meaning of nonduality as is expressed in the “old paradigm” dogmas of Advaita Vedanta.
Alex, you don’t seem to understand (or care) that you are promoting a form of existential nihilism, to which I suggest that it’s time for you to step up into higher (more logical and more hopeful) visions of our ultimate purpose and destiny.
seeds wrote: ↑Thu Oct 01, 2020 6:10 pm
I mean, you are certainly free to suggest the possibility that Moses (in some kind of meditative stupor) may have “inferred” (imagined) all of those things while gazing at the bush, but clearly that is not how Exodus 3 presents the scenario.
AlexW wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2020 1:05 am
I think its all just a story...
Agreed.
AlexW wrote: ↑Fri Oct 02, 2020 1:05 am
...but the core of the story, the message it conveys (when read accordingly) is quite enlightening.
I suggest that what you are inadvertently implying when you say “...when read accordingly...” is that the core of the story is enlightening after it has been filtered through the membrane of our personal belief system.
In which case, again, the message seems to be whatever we wish it to be.
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