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How Can We Know The Infinite?

Posted on Feb 25th, 2009 by Brian : Kosmic Change Agent Brian
“You ask, how can we know the Infinite? I answer, not by reason. It is the office of reason to distinguish and define. The Infinite, therefore, cannot be ranked among its objects. You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer—in which the divine essence is communicated to you. This is ecstasy. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite anxieties. Like only can apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self (ἅπλωσις), its divine essence, you realize this union—this Identity (ἕνωσις).”
– Plotinus, “Plotinus to Flaccus” (3rd century AD)
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Tagged with: Plontinus, philosophy, infinite, divine, spirituality

Easy to Cheap Shot the Traditional Straw Man God!

Posted on Feb 25th, 2009 by Brian : Kosmic Change Agent Brian
I love this dialogue between Deepak Chopra and Duncan Campbell. I was struck by Deepak's succinct description of the growing attack by Scientists on God, faith and all things religious. And how Deepak says Richard Dawkins, and his ilk, are old fashioned athieists, attacking an old fashioned God, a white bearded old man living in the sky. And that is an easy attack, easy to take cheap shots at that old fashioned idea of God!

(Professor Harvey Cox, Harvard Divinity School, thinks of Richard Dawkins as the Jerry Falwell of the atheists. "He takes the most narrow and most legalistic side of religion, and then he's against it." says Cox)

 Living Dialogues are a series of podcasts where Duncan Campbell interviews leaders in the field of Personal Development and Spirituality.  There are also partial transcripts available on his website.

Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell 

Episode 12: Deepak Chopra - Buddha: 
A Story of Enlightenment - Part 2
Deepak Chopra:  I have had several run-ins with Richard Dawkins both personally and, you know, in front of the camera.  And in public.  I have debated him a few times.  I am of the opinion that Dawkins is a fundamentalist and he is old-fashioned scientific fundamentalist.  He is a old-fashioned atheist.  The God that he is attacking is easy, is easy to attack.  That God has nothing to defend.  It's the old-fashioned dead, white man in the sky.

 

Duncan Campbell:  A kind of straw man.

 

Deepak Chopra:  A kind of straw man.  We don't have any problems with that kind of attack and that kind of old-fashioned atheism is somehow becoming very popular now.  You have a book by Christopher Hitchens and you have Daniel Dennett talking about the non-existence of consciousness, that it is an emerging property.  So you have these people, and they're very smart people in a sense.  On the other hand, you know, they are not really addressing the most fundamental issue which is, you know, they say consciousness doesn't exist.  Are they denying their own consciousness?  They say, you know, well consciousness is an artifact.  It's a synaptic network, making an inquiry of a synaptic network.  Even when you use phrases like, for which Dawkin has become very famous, the selfish gene.  Selfishness is an attribute of consciousness.  It's not an attribute of a double-stranded DNA.  The very word selfishness means there is somebody, or some being, or some conscious entity that is being self-ish.  So, I have a problem with people like Dawkins and I don't think they address the real issue.  On the other hand I can understand their disgust with religion because religious fundamentalist make blocked things like choice, free choice.  They've blocked things like stem-cell research.  They block things like understanding cloning, a lot of medical research and other kinds of really important research.  They are being blocked by people who have very primitive ideas about reality.  I mean, the fact still exists that people in our country here believe that the world was created 5,000 years ago by the "straw man" and that Adam and Eve were the first two humans about 5000, 6000 years ago.  We know that the Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.   We know the Earth is about 13.8 billion years old.  We know that the first biological organisms, which were chemo-litho autotrophic hypo-thermophils, on the rims of volcanoes showed up on about 2 billion years ago.  We know that homo-sapiens are about 60,000 years of age.  We know that written language is 5,000 years old, when presumably, according to the Bible, the world was created.  We know that oral language is 15,000 years.  So we need a spirituality, we need a secular spirituality which is consistent with the understandings of reality as we know them through science, which does not contradict what we know about the world in modern cosmology or modern physics or biology or mathematics or evolution.  We need a spirituality and I think that is where we are coming.  We are coming of age in understanding reality and understanding that a biological life-form is the most amazing combination of the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.  That is so interesting and so confounding at the same time because even-though we try to understand consciousness objectively - it is very difficult because consciousness is what allows us to understand the objective world.  For consciousness to understand itself is like the tooth has to bite itself or the eye has to look at itself.  We know nothing about even simple things like perception.  How does the brain, which is inside your skull and which has no experience of any external world, how does -- Your brain responds to things like PH, electrolytes, hormones, and body temperature, all that activity final translates into synaptic firings and neural networks, which ultimately are basically plus and minus binary codes of charges across cell membranes.  How does that give an experience of an external world?  Or how does that give an experience give subjectively? 
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Tagged with: Deepak Chopra, Richard Dawkins, God, atheists, science, consciousness, Daniel Dennett, Spirituality, Religion