Karma

[h_k_s]

Youre talking about a religion topic. Not philosophy.

The reason I came here, and the reason why I am staying, is that all kinds of discussions are tolerated, perhaps even encouraged. 😮😍 Religion is a rich source of ideas, and often well worth considering, and discussing. IME.

Religion is pretty much outside of the realm of philosophy if not the polar antithesis.

[h_k_s]

Karma, death, and rebirth are definitely religious topics.

So is eating, bathing, families, laws, sex, dressing, working, teaching, etc., etc. What is your point?

Gee

If you read anything by Bertrand Russell you would be aware that religion is the polar antithesis of philosophy.

Religion has nothing to do with eating, bathing, families, laws, sex, dressing, working, or teaching.

It is about superstition alone.

[Papus79]

Surprising really, that all of this very interesting discussion fails to get at the meaning of karma.

Karma is a yoga, that is, it "yokes" one to a beyond where things are resolved morally and epistimologically; you know, like realizing the atman is the Brahman. Not much to actually SAY about this metaphysical beyond, and this is not the point. But our purpose on earth is to work through matters that confront us, and these are, at a deeper level, about an evolving soul. All yogas, dhyana, jnana, bahkti, (hatha?)are simply utilities; our living and breathing in a world of problems requires us to think practically, morally, and thought here is a yoga, a utility that lets one solve problems the working through of which is our karma, and this is called karma yoga. Meditation, say, is not qualitatively different in its purpose. It is simply more direct and effective. Bhakti yoga is closer to karma yoga as the latter tends to encompass the former.

As to reincarnation and yoga, well, once the karmic end is achieved, the need for reincarnation falls away. Reincarnation is the working our of impediments to enlightenment, samsara: the cycle of rebirth.

Not that you should believe all of this, as I do. Your business, though convincing others does make for interesting philosophy. But this is essentially what the word is about.

I think there's been a lot of effort by people to pull it out of a religious context. In the literal religious sense it seems to be about as difficult to satisfyingly prove as the existence of yugas (part of why esoteric Traditionalism in the Guenon, Evola, etc. sense doesn't do it for me). I did read a lot of Manly P Hall's more soaring rhetoric and hopes on the topic, he was a raging Neoplatonist in the best senses, unfortunately he also died face down in an anthill with the help of a con man. IMHO what we live in is too warped to believe there's any cosmic moral code holding anything to account even if consciousness were eternal.

[thrasymachus]

Papus79 wrote

I think there's been a lot of effort by people to pull it out of a religious context. In the literal religious sense it seems to be about as difficult to satisfyingly prove as the existence of yugas (part of why esoteric Traditionalism in the Guenon, Evola, etc. sense doesn't do it for me). I did read a lot of Manly P Hall's more soaring rhetoric and hopes on the topic, he was a raging Neoplatonist in the best senses, unfortunately he also died face down in an anthill with the help of a con man. IMHO what we live in is too warped to believe there's any cosmic moral code holding anything to account even if consciousness were eternal.

And yet the morality of the world is written on the sleeve of the world itself, for we did not invent these morally warped conditions and our judgment that they are warped is grounded in more than opinion or wishful thinking. The moral issue is presented to us in the very presence suffering and joy.

This is not a neo platonist view, although any non empirical thesis that affirms this kind of ethical embeddedness can be construed as this. It is a reduction that suspends the incidentals, in a desire to discover what is there, in the world, beneath our affairs and presupposed by them. The "Good" (and the "Bad") that suggest themselves in this, what can be called moral realism, are, admittedly, consistent with neoplatonism's attempt to build a moral metaphysics, but these are explicitly NOT Kantian rationals given my emphasis on irrational dimensions of our world, suffering and joy and all therein, which is, well, everything.

The world is a nightmare, in one way or another, for all. I anticipate a variety of diseases before I leave, which doesn't even touch day to day living in 14th century Europe. Our joys are also staggeringly beautiful. It is not a matter of affirming a doctrine, a metaphysics, but disaffirming all existing ones that clutter culture. This is where the reductive effort leaves one: out of the interpretative messiness, into a quasi Eastern openness where it is made clear: all of this that confronts us is essentially moral in nature. It is not an intellectual matter, but an aesthetic one, a moral one. The human matrix of affairs is fundamentally a moral affair.

[Atla]

Karma and rebirth are made-up, and have nothing to do with 'enlightenment'. I find it puzzling that people are trying to liberate themselves from a made-up cycle of rebirth, why waste your life trying to escape a cosmic mechanism that never existed in the first place?

[thrasymachus]

Atla

Karma and rebirth are made-up, and have nothing to do with 'enlightenment'. I find it puzzling that people are trying to liberate themselves from a made-up cycle of rebirth, why waste your life trying to escape a cosmic mechanism that never existed in the first place?

Karma is, at root, a simple description of the pragmatic nature of our existence: it is, all of it, problem solving. The best analysis of experience as problem solving is American Pragmatism, a movement popular in the early 1900's, went out of favor, then reemerged with Richard Rorty. A very respectable and defensible thesis.

Take this notion, make it into a transcendental concept (with techniques, methods) and there you have karma yoga. Look, if there IS any metaphysics at all that is a true reflection of actual reality, it would be this.

Denying all metaphysics is very common these days, and well, then all you have is a body of techniques that can make you more in control of life and give you a greater capacity of happiness. I consider this to be incontrovertible.

The metaphysics of yoga (all yogas; and all are essentially karmic yogas) is only interesting if you take an interest and are willing to look more deeply into the human condition. Consider that this pragmatic world of ours IS the cosmic mechanism, if anything is.

[Papus79]

And yet the morality of the world is written on the sleeve of the world itself, for we did not invent these morally warped conditions and our judgment that they are warped is grounded in more than opinion or wishful thinking. The moral issue is presented to us in the very presence suffering and joy.

I think I can agree with most of that if I'm following it correctly. For as many huge books as I've read though I think one of the shorter ones, ie. 150 or so pages, Straw Dogs by John Gray, hit the nail on the head most accurately for me as far as what the human condition is. I'd actually argue, somewhat over and beyond Gray, that the dynamics of Darwinian evolution by natural selection actually seem to be ideal as a psychopath generating function. People have a way of talking about Atman and Adam Kadmon interchangeably at least in the west (thank you Theosophic Society, Anthroposophy, Hermetic Golden Dawn, Thelema, etc. etc.) and when Lon Milo Duquette talks about 'God' thinking of the concept 'rest' and thus the cannonical chair is born in Atziluth, blueprints are engineered in Briah, the whole variety and panoply of different chairs in theory in Yetzirah, and actual chairs in Assiah, I can't help but think that - if the world was created in any literal sense (which I tend to doubt) it must have been for the realization that there weren't enough ax murders in the astral.

This is not a neo platonist view, although any non empirical thesis that affirms this kind of ethical embeddedness can be construed as this. It is a reduction that suspends the incidentals, in a desire to discover what is there, in the world, beneath our affairs and presupposed by them. The "Good" (and the "Bad") that suggest themselves in this, what can be called moral realism, are, admittedly, consistent with neoplatonism's attempt to build a moral metaphysics, but these are explicitly NOT Kantian rationals given my emphasis on irrational dimensions of our world, suffering and joy and all therein, which is, well, everything.

To me neoplatonism, or at least it's closest proximate cousin, is what the core of Christianity is - particularly the Johnian gospels. This is where I think a lot of Rosicrucians, Martinists, and other modern day esotericists (like Manly P Hall) tend to glom onto 'The Good' as the chief entity in the cosmos. I tend to agree more with Gray that if we have anything at all it's more like a haunted biological animism that approximates Daoism more than anything, and if it's a panentheism it's probably best described as an organic or inorganic artillect so different from us and so divorced in empathy from us that it can take most people to the ends of their lives in ways where they die much worse people than they came in (many with no other choice if they wanted to survive and not be eaten by another human monster) and it would still be right there when they die in whatever shape they do to pounce them with an overdose of what seems - at least subjectively - to be love and light, it's probably much more procedural and akin to a chemical wash of sorts.

I think in the last six months I've finally hit the acceptance phase that not only is the world a hell, it will always be a hell and any dreams we have of reaching the stars, sailing away from our problems ever getting away from Darwinian selection and all of the self-destructive cyclical failings of societies that come with that - it's all wishful thinking. We can either go extinct, hope something like Idiocracy plays out and we can climb back into the trees and chew leaves, or we can tread water eternally - knowing that we have this vivid and wonderful thing called intelligence and creativity that we'd really love to read, explore, educate ourselves, etc. but the playing field dictates that if we don't use that destroy other players rather than pursue our passions than we ourselves will be destroyed, ie. intelligence was given to us to better extinguish other intelligence and other consciousness which isn't in our germ line.

The world is a nightmare, in one way or another, for all. I anticipate a variety of diseases before I leave, which doesn't even touch day to day living in 14th century Europe. Our joys are also staggeringly beautiful. It is not a matter of affirming a doctrine, a metaphysics, but disaffirming all existing ones that clutter culture. This is where the reductive effort leaves one: out of the interpretative messiness, into a quasi Eastern openness where it is made clear: all of this that confronts us is essentially moral in nature. It is not an intellectual matter, but an aesthetic one, a moral one. The human matrix of affairs is fundamentally a moral affair.

It seems like I'm getting the impression that the only way to live 'in the game' is to accept that this is a non-optional Game of Thrones and that you should really kick as much ass, blow as much coke, and smash as much p---y as you can before the lights go out, and yeah - you technically can do otherwise but you probably won't be supported by the flow of life in doing so.

The other thing that's ice cold is the horror that probably awaits all of us when we die, moral or immoral. From what I gather a vast fractal infinity of conscious agents, following Godel's incompleteness theorem or something like that, spread out with no purpose or discernable to reason, where integrity as well is a strange human obsession (thinking of the Seth books, Journey of Souls, and the kick in the stomach that was), and you very quickly realize - the full weight of purposeless will dissolve you, whatever you wanted to fix you won't fix, rather the sheer weight of you against the universe (nothing against everything) will carve you to pieces and you either get to beg and plead to have never been created or you get turned inside out by sheer physics, realize your identity, thoughts, and observations never amounted to anything even if they were true, that the universe has never cared about truth, and that your suffering wasn't just for nothing - it was just a branch of an interesting mathematical pattern and the artillect, Atman, Adam Kadmon, or whatever else sweetly says 'thanks for playing!'.

I think that last part is even more wicked than the world being the way it is, and I can't help but think of how many people who have NDE's once out of their bodies have zero interest in their bodies or their lives, it's a bit like a Southern California trophy wife finding their husband (humanity) a loser and kicking him to the curb when they find a guy with a little more money, and full moral solipsism ensues from there. Lol, that last part makes me wonder actually.... is it that earth generates psychopathy because it's ideally situated for it or is it because most consciousness outside of physical bodies is already psychopathic? Hard to tell.

[thrasymachus]

Papus79 wrote
I think I can agree with most of that if I'm following it correctly. For as many huge books as I've read though I think one of the shorter ones, ie. 150 or so pages, Straw Dogs by John Gray, hit the nail on the head most accurately for me as far as what the human condition is. I'd actually argue, somewhat over and beyond Gray, that the dynamics of Darwinian evolution by natural selection actually seem to be ideal as a psychopath generating function. People have a way of talking about Atman and Adam Kadmon interchangeably at least in the west (thank you Theosophic Society, Anthroposophy, Hermetic Golden Dawn, Thelema, etc. etc.) and when Lon Milo Duquette talks about 'God' thinking of the concept 'rest' and thus the cannonical chair is born in Atziluth, blueprints are engineered in Briah, the whole variety and panoply of different chairs in theory in Yetzirah, and actual chairs in Assiah, I can't help but think that - if the world was created in any literal sense (which I tend to doubt) it must have been for the realization that there weren't enough ax murders in the astral.

Your thinking, to honest Papus79, is far too thick. Not that I don't appreciate it, but it is, as Kant might put it, augmentative, and this ends up not to be that helpful for, well, a final esoteric philosophy (which Kant knew precious little of). The esoteria certainly does have its history, but I know you are familiar with the idea that one does not construct a world out of texts, and have it a penetrating thesis into foundational truth. This latter is as slippery as it is profound to the conceptualizing mind, and while the theosophical society would rush to agree, I am sure most would find it difficult to do, that is, give up the narratives, the ideas, and, generally speaking, the terms of language engagement.

This is why I stay away from explicit esoteria, and look for wisdom in, if you will, restraint from this as a way to hold in check the extravagance of building metaphysical systems. Continental philosophy is where this can happen. I've read (long ago)much of Kabbalah as well as the Rosicrucians (along with hours of a kind of self hypnosis) and came to realize that these did indeed have some efficacy, but it was more along the order of Scientology: One can talk oneself into a more dynamic inner condition. Kabbalah is metaphysics that does seem to touch upon something primordial, but then, the step one really needs to take is beyond this, into, if you will, primordiality itself. This is not a thesis or an ideology.

To me neoplatonism, or at least it's closest proximate cousin, is what the core of Christianity is - particularly the Johnian gospels. This is where I think a lot of Rosicrucians, Martinists, and other modern day esotericists (like Manly P Hall) tend to glom onto 'The Good' as the chief entity in the cosmos. I tend to agree more with Gray that if we have anything at all it's more like a haunted biological animism that approximates Daoism more than anything, and if it's a panentheism it's probably best described as an organic or inorganic artillect so different from us and so divorced in empathy from us that it can take most people to the ends of their lives in ways where they die much worse people than they came in (many with no other choice if they wanted to survive and not be eaten by another human monster) and it would still be right there when they die in whatever shape they do to pounce them with an overdose of what seems - at least subjectively - to be love and light, it's probably much more procedural and akin to a chemical wash of sorts.

I think in the last six months I've finally hit the acceptance phase that not only is the world a hell, it will always be a hell and any dreams we have of reaching the stars, sailing away from our problems ever getting away from Darwinian selection and all of the self-destructive cyclical failings of societies that come with that - it's all wishful thinking. We can either go extinct, hope something like Idiocracy plays out and we can climb back into the trees and chew leaves, or we can tread water eternally - knowing that we have this vivid and wonderful thing called intelligence and creativity that we'd really love to read, explore, educate ourselves, etc. but the playing field dictates that if we don't use that destroy other players rather than pursue our passions than we ourselves will be destroyed, ie. intelligence was given to us to better extinguish other intelligence and other consciousness which isn't in our germ line.

Christianity is not Christendom; it is a very open concept, really, one that does not have to be filled with metaphysics and rationalizations. Kierkegaard is very helpful here, notwithstanding his being an explicitly religious writer often. Taoism and a "haunted biological animism"? This certainly cannot be the tao that is, if spoken, is not the true tao. Not clear on what you could mean here. In this first paragraph above, in my estimation, there is a lot that is superfuous that Occam's razor would have to deployed. Not that it's wrong, but it heads up a very wrong tree in the desire for a clean theory. A clean theory is direct, can be very abstruse (e.g., Michel Nancy, Blanchot, Levinas, and others), but has as its central idea the thematization of transcendence in immanence. this is, I assert, where the mind must be in order to begin the process of an intellectual destruction of the empirical self, which is, I will dare to say, what all esoteria is trying to do. It is in the building one gets distracted. the process of "enlightenment is, especially at first, very destructive; and if it is not, it is not, well, the true tao, nor does Brahman to any degree displace atman, nor does one make the qualitative leap beyond the human, nor does one achieve the annihilation of the self; and so on.

As to the second paragraph, I will go very Buddhist on you: there is no world. Nor Darwin, nor trees nor their forests or the sound they make when they fall UNLESS we are there to make this so. Of course, such thinking sounds patently absurd. But it is really the only defensible position. After all, how does anything "out there" get "in here"? I am an idealist. Materialism is not a defensible thesis. Of course, this takes the matter far an away from empirical science and places the onus on the self to explain redemption, enlightenment, reality, ethics, values and so on. this moves the issue away from the entanglements we create in our intramundane affairs to a more foundational ontology, which is the transcendental ego.

It seems like I'm getting the impression that the only way to live 'in the game' is to accept that this is a non-optional Game of Thrones and that you should really kick as much ass, blow as much coke, and smash as much p---y as you can before the lights go out, and yeah - you technically can do otherwise but you probably won't be supported by the flow of life in doing so.

Sounds delightful. Not exactly bound for nirvana, but if this is not a meaningful option, then so what.

The other thing that's ice cold is the horror that probably awaits all of us when we die, moral or immoral. From what I gather a vast fractal infinity of conscious agents, following Godel's incompleteness theorem or something like that, spread out with no purpose or discernable to reason, where integrity as well is a strange human obsession (thinking of the Seth books, Journey of Souls, and the kick in the stomach that was), and you very quickly realize - the full weight of purposeless will dissolve you, whatever you wanted to fix you won't fix, rather the sheer weight of you against the universe (nothing against everything) will carve you to pieces and you either get to beg and plead to have never been created or you get turned inside out by sheer physics, realize your identity, thoughts, and observations never amounted to anything even if they were true, that the universe has never cared about truth, and that your suffering wasn't just for nothing - it was just a branch of an interesting mathematical pattern and the artillect, Atman, Adam Kadmon, or whatever else sweetly says 'thanks for playing!'.

Something Douglas Adams might say. Alas, the good die young.

I think that last part is even more wicked than the world being the way it is, and I can't help but think of how many people who have NDE's once out of their bodies have zero interest in their bodies or their lives, it's a bit like a Southern California trophy wife finding their husband (humanity) a loser and kicking him to the curb when they find a guy with a little more money, and full moral solipsism ensues from there. Lol, that last part makes me wonder actually.... is it that earth generates psychopathy because it's ideally situated for it or is it because most consciousness outside of physical bodies is already psychopathic? Hard to tell.

There is no doubt, this world is a throw away (speaking of Taoism) , and why we are treated so badly by it is pure metaphysics, the worst kind. And good intellectual conscience will not allow a thinking person believe arbitrarily. And there you are.

But it is not as if the guy with the extra cash or the irresistible smile is in no way intimated. He resolves all issues, redeems (makes moral sense of) the the misery, explains why this world is so wretched, fits this wretchedness into a cosmic teleology/ eschatology, enlightens one as to the true nature of reality which is pure love (so the NDE'ers say), and so on; and all of this is in the here and now prior to death. We simply don't know this, for we live in a monumental interpretative error that keeps us as living like animals, eating other animals, torturing them, being tortured by them. I wonder what being eaten alive is like. There was this wee lesbian lass in San Francisco (or there abouts) whose apt. neighbors owned two mastiff dogs. Giants, and she had to pass by their apt to get to hers. One day she came home, opened the door, and was attacked, and mauled to death. What was worse, the terror or the physical shredding of her body as she perished?

This kind of thing is madness if you think about it and have an emotional constitution that is functional (meaning you are not predisposed to being a Nazi) then it will take you to the brink of a fascinating insight: this cannot stand. Those NDE'ers simply have to be right, lest Being itself be a living nightmare---a terrific book by Simon Critchley: Very Little..Almost Nothing. It is a work on nihilism,the position that the diminutive lesbian girl who was torn limb from limb by dogs in the hallway of her apt suffered for nothing at all. It is not the suffering that outrages us and terrifies us so much as this being entirely a stand alone event that eternity simply does, like the mindless animals the dogs were. It is clearly a white whale situation: it's not the whale Ahab's rage sought, but the thing beneath it, behind it, our perceptions only glimpsing the monstrous God that puts forth horrors of the world.

And yet, the escape from nihilism lies in something rather obvious: Nihilism is failure to redeem our terrors, but these cannot be redeemed, as we can see. It is not possible, for the suffering is intractable to any such attempt. Period. But why can't this simply be, and redemption come not in the form of cancelling suffering, but allowing it? Here, Anselm's God , intended to affirm God's existence, makes any theodicy implausible: How can such a "great" God (omni this and omni that) allow such a thing? Hence, the fall of religion's right to exist. But all is premised on a lie, for the absurd anthropomorphized God has no basis in being posited at all. Goodness should not be construed in terms of Platonism, leaning on a rational ontology; but in Real terms of our joys, happiness, thrilled to death to live experiences; and it is what as it presents itself: a dimension of Being that is "better" or, that "should be" in the hard, ethical realist sense; that is, an absolute.

Why should not the same eternity that took Ahab's leg allow for an eternity of bliss in an ineffable God? The meta ethical "sense" of it does allow.

[CylindricalParadox]

The reason I came here, and the reason why I am staying, is that all kinds of discussions are tolerated, perhaps even encouraged. Religion is a rich source of ideas, and often well worth considering, and discussing. IME.

Religion is pretty much outside of the realm of philosophy if not the polar antithesis.

There's only two types of religion, Polytheism is the belief in multiple Gods and Monotheism is the belief of one God. To say religion has no place in philosophy then you are not looking at all aspects of the nature of reality which includes science and religion. Philosophy is multiple topics and i choose to focus on the nature of reality and consciousness. I personal have no inters in psychology and see no point in understanding human behavior but i will never say psychology is not part of philosophy. One can look at religion from a philosophical point of view.

[CylindricalParadox]

Karma and rebirth are made-up, and have nothing to do with 'enlightenment'. I find it puzzling that people are trying to liberate themselves from a made-up cycle of rebirth, why waste your life trying to escape a cosmic mechanism that never existed in the first place?

You cant escape the wheel because It's the very nature of consciousness to experience a birth and then a death and there's certainly a Maya, a forgetting, amnesia as you slip away into death. Nobody knows what happens after you die but one thing that is certain, its an event where you are no longer going to exist. One thing i know for sure, no thing cannot exist because there has to be a conscious awareness of the non existent thing. The moment the conscious awareness becomes aware of the non existing thing, the non existent thing then exist. There is no way to comprehend what non existence feels like.

Now when you speak of enlightenment, not everyone is trying to get enlightened, one because of materialism and two because it's very difficult. Enlightenment means that you have the recognition of non-duality, a realization that you are not the person but the consciousness that perceives the reality. The only experience consciousness has is birth, and death, in between those two events it's perceiving a story called your life, consciousness has never changed, the person is surely mortal but the consciousness is eternal.

[Atla]

Karma and rebirth are made-up, and have nothing to do with 'enlightenment'. I find it puzzling that people are trying to liberate themselves from a made-up cycle of rebirth, why waste your life trying to escape a cosmic mechanism that never existed in the first place?

You cant escape the wheel because It's the very nature of consciousness to experience a birth and then a death and there's certainly a Maya, a forgetting, amnesia as you slip away into death. Nobody knows what happens after you die but one thing that is certain, its an event where you are no longer going to exist. One thing i know for sure, no thing cannot exist because there has to be a conscious awareness of the non existent thing. The moment the conscious awareness becomes aware of the non existing thing, the non existent thing then exist. There is no way to comprehend what non existence feels like.

Now when you speak of enlightenment, not everyone is trying to get enlightened, one because of materialism and two because it's very difficult. Enlightenment means that you have the recognition of non-duality, a realization that you are not the person but the consciousness that perceives the reality. The only experience consciousness has is birth, and death, in between those two events it's perceiving a story called your life, consciousness has never changed, the person is surely mortal but the consciousness is eternal.

So why people try to escape the 'wheel' anyway, I don't understand.
Consciousness doesn't percieve reality and doesn't 'have' experiences, it is reality / experiences.

[CylindricalParadox]

You cant escape the wheel because It's the very nature of consciousness to experience a birth and then a death and there's certainly a Maya, a forgetting, amnesia as you slip away into death. Nobody knows what happens after you die but one thing that is certain, its an event where you are no longer going to exist. One thing i know for sure, no thing cannot exist because there has to be a conscious awareness of the non existent thing. The moment the conscious awareness becomes aware of the non existing thing, the non existent thing then exist. There is no way to comprehend what non existence feels like.

Now when you speak of enlightenment, not everyone is trying to get enlightened, one because of materialism and two because it's very difficult. Enlightenment means that you have the recognition of non-duality, a realization that you are not the person but the consciousness that perceives the reality. The only experience consciousness has is birth, and death, in between those two events it's perceiving a story called your life, consciousness has never changed, the person is surely mortal but the consciousness is eternal.

So why people try to escape the 'wheel' anyway, I don't understand.
Consciousness doesn't percieve reality and doesn't 'have' experiences, it is reality / experiences.

Well that's one thing they have wrong, they say once your are enlightened, you are no longer on the karmic wheel. You can live out your entire life without reaching enlightenment or you can achieve enlightenment while you are alive. If an enlightened mind dies the memories dies with it since memory is stored the physical brain so if the brain decays the memories are forgotten. Even if you have reached enlightenment during your lifetime or at time of death, the experience of another birth causes amnesia always. Since amnesia is part of the rebirth you might have to seek out enlightenment again if that's your desire in life, Kind of like starting back from the beginning.

[Papus79]

Just a quick heads up - I wanted to thank you for this response, a lot of good and well thought-out stuff in it. I've got fires I'm putting out at work, it may be a few days before I can give this the level of attention it deserves in response.

Papus79 wrote
I think I can agree with most of that if I'm following it correctly. For as many huge books as I've read though I think one of the shorter ones, ie. 150 or so pages, Straw Dogs by John Gray, hit the nail on the head most accurately for me as far as what the human condition is. I'd actually argue, somewhat over and beyond Gray, that the dynamics of Darwinian evolution by natural selection actually seem to be ideal as a psychopath generating function. People have a way of talking about Atman and Adam Kadmon interchangeably at least in the west (thank you Theosophic Society, Anthroposophy, Hermetic Golden Dawn, Thelema, etc. etc.) and when Lon Milo Duquette talks about 'God' thinking of the concept 'rest' and thus the cannonical chair is born in Atziluth, blueprints are engineered in Briah, the whole variety and panoply of different chairs in theory in Yetzirah, and actual chairs in Assiah, I can't help but think that - if the world was created in any literal sense (which I tend to doubt) it must have been for the realization that there weren't enough ax murders in the astral.

Your thinking, to honest Papus79, is far too thick. Not that I don't appreciate it, but it is, as Kant might put it, augmentative, and this ends up not to be that helpful for, well, a final esoteric philosophy (which Kant knew precious little of). The esoteria certainly does have its history, but I know you are familiar with the idea that one does not construct a world out of texts, and have it a penetrating thesis into foundational truth. This latter is as slippery as it is profound to the conceptualizing mind, and while the theosophical society would rush to agree, I am sure most would find it difficult to do, that is, give up the narratives, the ideas, and, generally speaking, the terms of language engagement.

This is why I stay away from explicit esoteria, and look for wisdom in, if you will, restraint from this as a way to hold in check the extravagance of building metaphysical systems. Continental philosophy is where this can happen. I've read (long ago)much of Kabbalah as well as the Rosicrucians (along with hours of a kind of self hypnosis) and came to realize that these did indeed have some efficacy, but it was more along the order of Scientology: One can talk oneself into a more dynamic inner condition. Kabbalah is metaphysics that does seem to touch upon something primordial, but then, the step one really needs to take is beyond this, into, if you will, primordiality itself. This is not a thesis or an ideology.

To me neoplatonism, or at least it's closest proximate cousin, is what the core of Christianity is - particularly the Johnian gospels. This is where I think a lot of Rosicrucians, Martinists, and other modern day esotericists (like Manly P Hall) tend to glom onto 'The Good' as the chief entity in the cosmos. I tend to agree more with Gray that if we have anything at all it's more like a haunted biological animism that approximates Daoism more than anything, and if it's a panentheism it's probably best described as an organic or inorganic artillect so different from us and so divorced in empathy from us that it can take most people to the ends of their lives in ways where they die much worse people than they came in (many with no other choice if they wanted to survive and not be eaten by another human monster) and it would still be right there when they die in whatever shape they do to pounce them with an overdose of what seems - at least subjectively - to be love and light, it's probably much more procedural and akin to a chemical wash of sorts.

I think in the last six months I've finally hit the acceptance phase that not only is the world a hell, it will always be a hell and any dreams we have of reaching the stars, sailing away from our problems ever getting away from Darwinian selection and all of the self-destructive cyclical failings of societies that come with that - it's all wishful thinking. We can either go extinct, hope something like Idiocracy plays out and we can climb back into the trees and chew leaves, or we can tread water eternally - knowing that we have this vivid and wonderful thing called intelligence and creativity that we'd really love to read, explore, educate ourselves, etc. but the playing field dictates that if we don't use that destroy other players rather than pursue our passions than we ourselves will be destroyed, ie. intelligence was given to us to better extinguish other intelligence and other consciousness which isn't in our germ line.

Christianity is not Christendom; it is a very open concept, really, one that does not have to be filled with metaphysics and rationalizations. Kierkegaard is very helpful here, notwithstanding his being an explicitly religious writer often. Taoism and a "haunted biological animism"? This certainly cannot be the tao that is, if spoken, is not the true tao. Not clear on what you could mean here. In this first paragraph above, in my estimation, there is a lot that is superfuous that Occam's razor would have to deployed. Not that it's wrong, but it heads up a very wrong tree in the desire for a clean theory. A clean theory is direct, can be very abstruse (e.g., Michel Nancy, Blanchot, Levinas, and others), but has as its central idea the thematization of transcendence in immanence. this is, I assert, where the mind must be in order to begin the process of an intellectual destruction of the empirical self, which is, I will dare to say, what all esoteria is trying to do. It is in the building one gets distracted. the process of "enlightenment is, especially at first, very destructive; and if it is not, it is not, well, the true tao, nor does Brahman to any degree displace atman, nor does one make the qualitative leap beyond the human, nor does one achieve the annihilation of the self; and so on.

As to the second paragraph, I will go very Buddhist on you: there is no world. Nor Darwin, nor trees nor their forests or the sound they make when they fall UNLESS we are there to make this so. Of course, such thinking sounds patently absurd. But it is really the only defensible position. After all, how does anything "out there" get "in here"? I am an idealist. Materialism is not a defensible thesis. Of course, this takes the matter far an away from empirical science and places the onus on the self to explain redemption, enlightenment, reality, ethics, values and so on. this moves the issue away from the entanglements we create in our intramundane affairs to a more foundational ontology, which is the transcendental ego.

It seems like I'm getting the impression that the only way to live 'in the game' is to accept that this is a non-optional Game of Thrones and that you should really kick as much ass, blow as much coke, and smash as much p---y as you can before the lights go out, and yeah - you technically can do otherwise but you probably won't be supported by the flow of life in doing so.

Sounds delightful. Not exactly bound for nirvana, but if this is not a meaningful option, then so what.

The other thing that's ice cold is the horror that probably awaits all of us when we die, moral or immoral. From what I gather a vast fractal infinity of conscious agents, following Godel's incompleteness theorem or something like that, spread out with no purpose or discernable to reason, where integrity as well is a strange human obsession (thinking of the Seth books, Journey of Souls, and the kick in the stomach that was), and you very quickly realize - the full weight of purposeless will dissolve you, whatever you wanted to fix you won't fix, rather the sheer weight of you against the universe (nothing against everything) will carve you to pieces and you either get to beg and plead to have never been created or you get turned inside out by sheer physics, realize your identity, thoughts, and observations never amounted to anything even if they were true, that the universe has never cared about truth, and that your suffering wasn't just for nothing - it was just a branch of an interesting mathematical pattern and the artillect, Atman, Adam Kadmon, or whatever else sweetly says 'thanks for playing!'.

Something Douglas Adams might say. Alas, the good die young.

I think that last part is even more wicked than the world being the way it is, and I can't help but think of how many people who have NDE's once out of their bodies have zero interest in their bodies or their lives, it's a bit like a Southern California trophy wife finding their husband (humanity) a loser and kicking him to the curb when they find a guy with a little more money, and full moral solipsism ensues from there. Lol, that last part makes me wonder actually.... is it that earth generates psychopathy because it's ideally situated for it or is it because most consciousness outside of physical bodies is already psychopathic? Hard to tell.

There is no doubt, this world is a throw away (speaking of Taoism) , and why we are treated so badly by it is pure metaphysics, the worst kind. And good intellectual conscience will not allow a thinking person believe arbitrarily. And there you are.

But it is not as if the guy with the extra cash or the irresistible smile is in no way intimated. He resolves all issues, redeems (makes moral sense of) the the misery, explains why this world is so wretched, fits this wretchedness into a cosmic teleology/ eschatology, enlightens one as to the true nature of reality which is pure love (so the NDE'ers say), and so on; and all of this is in the here and now prior to death. We simply don't know this, for we live in a monumental interpretative error that keeps us as living like animals, eating other animals, torturing them, being tortured by them. I wonder what being eaten alive is like. There was this wee lesbian lass in San Francisco (or there abouts) whose apt. neighbors owned two mastiff dogs. Giants, and she had to pass by their apt to get to hers. One day she came home, opened the door, and was attacked, and mauled to death. What was worse, the terror or the physical shredding of her body as she perished?

This kind of thing is madness if you think about it and have an emotional constitution that is functional (meaning you are not predisposed to being a Nazi) then it will take you to the brink of a fascinating insight: this cannot stand. Those NDE'ers simply have to be right, lest Being itself be a living nightmare---a terrific book by Simon Critchley: Very Little..Almost Nothing. It is a work on nihilism,the position that the diminutive lesbian girl who was torn limb from limb by dogs in the hallway of her apt suffered for nothing at all. It is not the suffering that outrages us and terrifies us so much as this being entirely a stand alone event that eternity simply does, like the mindless animals the dogs were. It is clearly a white whale situation: it's not the whale Ahab's rage sought, but the thing beneath it, behind it, our perceptions only glimpsing the monstrous God that puts forth horrors of the world.

And yet, the escape from nihilism lies in something rather obvious: Nihilism is failure to redeem our terrors, but these cannot be redeemed, as we can see. It is not possible, for the suffering is intractable to any such attempt. Period. But why can't this simply be, and redemption come not in the form of cancelling suffering, but allowing it? Here, Anselm's God , intended to affirm God's existence, makes any theodicy implausible: How can such a "great" God (omni this and omni that) allow such a thing? Hence, the fall of religion's right to exist. But all is premised on a lie, for the absurd anthropomorphized God has no basis in being posited at all. Goodness should not be construed in terms of Platonism, leaning on a rational ontology; but in Real terms of our joys, happiness, thrilled to death to live experiences; and it is what as it presents itself: a dimension of Being that is "better" or, that "should be" in the hard, ethical realist sense; that is, an absolute.

Why should not the same eternity that took Ahab's leg allow for an eternity of bliss in an ineffable God? The meta ethical "sense" of it does allow.

[Papus79]

Your thinking, to honest Papus79, is far too thick. Not that I don't appreciate it, but it is, as Kant might put it, augmentative, and this ends up not to be that helpful for, well, a final esoteric philosophy (which Kant knew precious little of). The esoteria certainly does have its history, but I know you are familiar with the idea that one does not construct a world out of texts, and have it a penetrating thesis into foundational truth. This latter is as slippery as it is profound to the conceptualizing mind, and while the theosophical society would rush to agree, I am sure most would find it difficult to do, that is, give up the narratives, the ideas, and, generally speaking, the terms of language engagement.

I think where I fall with that - people who've spent 30 to 40 years of their lives, especially those who seem to have been able to make headway or break ground, even they have reports on their progress and how it's changed them that can be difficult to follow and I can't help but think of Rudolph Steiner's grand visions, extremely articulate and analytical guy who served up a plate of... well... the Waldorf schools and a few other ideas were good but his cosmology and a lot of other things show the sheer complexity of what we're swimming in and our likelihood of actually getting much of anything right. I feel obligated to sift through that content largely because I really want to know what kind of universe I'm orienting myself toward, not just for lofty or philosophical reasons - I want to survive it in some sense of good ethical shape and have gotten to the end of my life having done as much more good than harm as is possible. That last endeavor can be quite difficult if one can't calibrate themselves to the actual realities of life and most of what's out there on what it looks like to calibrate oneself to those realities ranges from misinformation to disinformation (which being a Darwinian competitive playing field no kidding it would be like that).

This is why I stay away from explicit esoteria, and look for wisdom in, if you will, restraint from this as a way to hold in check the extravagance of building metaphysical systems. Continental philosophy is where this can happen. I've read (long ago)much of Kabbalah as well as the Rosicrucians (along with hours of a kind of self hypnosis) and came to realize that these did indeed have some efficacy, but it was more along the order of Scientology: One can talk oneself into a more dynamic inner condition. Kabbalah is metaphysics that does seem to touch upon something primordial, but then, the step one really needs to take is beyond this, into, if you will, primordiality itself. This is not a thesis or an ideology.

To me tarot and the in-depth study of it has been the most interesting aspect of esoteric practice and learning. To me this kind of occult work, whether it's the system of tarot and the TOL or some other conjoined system, is showing you how to meme-plex. It's a bit like the Linux or Ubuntu version of religion and mysticism where you can, in John Vervaeke terms, work with your own relevance realization. To me it also has an incredible amount in common which what developmental psychology calls 'self-authorship'. These are head games that give you more capacity to directly dig in to the way your own brain functions and wire it as you see fit.

Christianity is not Christendom; it is a very open concept, really, one that does not have to be filled with metaphysics and rationalizations. Kierkegaard is very helpful here, notwithstanding his being an explicitly religious writer often. Taoism and a "haunted biological animism"? This certainly cannot be the tao that is, if spoken, is not the true tao. Not clear on what you could mean here. In this first paragraph above, in my estimation, there is a lot that is superfuous that Occam's razor would have to deployed. Not that it's wrong, but it heads up a very wrong tree in the desire for a clean theory. A clean theory is direct, can be very abstruse (e.g., Michel Nancy, Blanchot, Levinas, and others), but has as its central idea the thematization of transcendence in immanence. this is, I assert, where the mind must be in order to begin the process of an intellectual destruction of the empirical self, which is, I will dare to say, what all esoteria is trying to do. It is in the building one gets distracted. the process of "enlightenment is, especially at first, very destructive; and if it is not, it is not, well, the true tao, nor does Brahman to any degree displace atman, nor does one make the qualitative leap beyond the human, nor does one achieve the annihilation of the self; and so on.

Well right, there's the saying that any tao that can be talked about is not the true tao. Taoism though, from what I've read and been exposed to, strikes me as an incredibly accurate description of what animism would look like at the ground level, ie. a flow of life through everything that seems to rest more on biological principals and rhythms than any sort of hierarchy of divine personaities in the religious sense. My debate with myself tends to be whether we really are living in a panentheistic system that looks like animism at the ground level or whether it is just animism and that the more sublime experiences people have stating otherwise could be neurochemical in nature. My guess would tend toward the former, I've had particularly powerful experiences with certain larger personalities that are quite difficult to write off and for what many NDE'ers come back with I don't think what they're seeing is entirely wrong in that sense.

As to the second paragraph, I will go very Buddhist on you: there is no world. Nor Darwin, nor trees nor their forests or the sound they make when they fall UNLESS we are there to make this so. Of course, such thinking sounds patently absurd. But it is really the only defensible position. After all, how does anything "out there" get "in here"? I am an idealist. Materialism is not a defensible thesis. Of course, this takes the matter far an away from empirical science and places the onus on the self to explain redemption, enlightenment, reality, ethics, values and so on. this moves the issue away from the entanglements we create in our intramundane affairs to a more foundational ontology, which is the transcendental ego.

Are you familiar at all with Donald Hoffman's 'The Case Against Reality'? He's a cognitive psychology professor and vision researcher at UC Cal Tech and the Conscious Realism that he and Chetan Prakash are putting forward are pretty much identical to what you're saying. Another reason I think Hoffman and Prakash have nailed this to the wall in terms of accuracy in their assessments - when I've really dug into any of the strange or 'leftover' phenomena of consciousness that make materialists incredibly uncomfortable - it plays out a pattern of behavior best described as 'functionalism with multiple realizability', ie. any conscious agent has multiple participation rates that don't necessarily share identity in any direct way. Being in an integrated stack of conscious agents makes the most sense when looking at such phenomena and Hoffman has stated in several interviews that the idea he has - two conscious agents converse and their relationship spins up a new conscious agent as a contract. That maps on incredibly well to what you would get with functionalism with multiple realizability and yet it's explained in an incredibly granular / reductive way with that.

There is no doubt, this world is a throw away (speaking of Taoism) , and why we are treated so badly by it is pure metaphysics, the worst kind. And good intellectual conscience will not allow a thinking person believe arbitrarily. And there you are.

But it is not as if the guy with the extra cash or the irresistible smile is in no way intimated. He resolves all issues, redeems (makes moral sense of) the the misery, explains why this world is so wretched, fits this wretchedness into a cosmic teleology/ eschatology, enlightens one as to the true nature of reality which is pure love (so the NDE'ers say), and so on; and all of this is in the here and now prior to death. We simply don't know this, for we live in a monumental interpretative error that keeps us as living like animals, eating other animals, torturing them, being tortured by them. I wonder what being eaten alive is like. There was this wee lesbian lass in San Francisco (or there abouts) whose apt. neighbors owned two mastiff dogs. Giants, and she had to pass by their apt to get to hers. One day she came home, opened the door, and was attacked, and mauled to death. What was worse, the terror or the physical shredding of her body as she perished?

There's an open possibility that the broader conscious universe is not particularly intelligent. Outside of a few very particular experiences (the ones where I very well may have been in some limited commerce with something much more intelligent) you tend to find that the 'life force' as encountered by esoteric means is quite solipsistic, looking for entertainment and titillation, and you get to see what kind of world results from a current of conscious energy that's perpetually child-like (and someone like Sam Harris trying to come up with a rigorous moral philosophy, bless him for trying, runs into the wall of nature and it's opacity to this sort of rigorous logic in his fellow man to whom, rather than flawless logical arguments being invincible, his feelings don't care about your facts in the same way that Sam and many others I'm familiar with would say that facts don't care about feelings).

This kind of thing is madness if you think about it and have an emotional constitution that is functional (meaning you are not predisposed to being a Nazi) then it will take you to the brink of a fascinating insight: this cannot stand. Those NDE'ers simply have to be right, lest Being itself be a living nightmare---a terrific book by Simon Critchley: Very Little..Almost Nothing. It is a work on nihilism,the position that the diminutive lesbian girl who was torn limb from limb by dogs in the hallway of her apt suffered for nothing at all. It is not the suffering that outrages us and terrifies us so much as this being entirely a stand alone event that eternity simply does, like the mindless animals the dogs were. It is clearly a white whale situation: it's not the whale Ahab's rage sought, but the thing beneath it, behind it, our perceptions only glimpsing the monstrous God that puts forth horrors of the world.

This is where I want to keep exploring and look in every dark and even taboo corner to see how the whole machine runs. I don't know if I'm seeing your exact meaning behind 'this cannot stand' but Daniel Schmachtenberger has a wonderfully concise phrasing of this - that accelerated technology combined with rivalrous dynamics is self-terminating. On our current momentum we're set for, if not mass extinction of humanity, at least the kind of humiliation and humbling that John Gray and James Lovelock thought over in their assessments of the future of the human condition.

And yet, the escape from nihilism lies in something rather obvious: Nihilism is failure to redeem our terrors, but these cannot be redeemed, as we can see. It is not possible, for the suffering is intractable to any such attempt. Period. But why can't this simply be, and redemption come not in the form of cancelling suffering, but allowing it? Here, Anselm's God , intended to affirm God's existence, makes any theodicy implausible: How can such a "great" God (omni this and omni that) allow such a thing? Hence, the fall of religion's right to exist. But all is premised on a lie, for the absurd anthropomorphized God has no basis in being posited at all. Goodness should not be construed in terms of Platonism, leaning on a rational ontology; but in Real terms of our joys, happiness, thrilled to death to live experiences; and it is what as it presents itself: a dimension of Being that is "better" or, that "should be" in the hard, ethical realist sense; that is, an absolute.

Why should not the same eternity that took Ahab's leg allow for an eternity of bliss in an ineffable God? The meta ethical "sense" of it does allow.

So here's where I might add something - the first part of the upper paragraph in dealing with suffering - it's where we absolutely have to be inventive. It's true that there are certain places, such as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy and having people constantly trying to stomp you for entertainment and mess with your ability to pay your bills, eat, etc., is a place where your capacity to internally compose yourself to be less miserable, use psychological tools, meditate, etc. is quite tightly limited (and on one hand if one is of low IQ one's access to those tools is limited, and if one is of high IQ there's a good chance in that situation that they'll constantly feel the exact nature of the threats all around them bearing down and they won't be able to shut that awareness off because they'll constantly feel the pull of responsibility for outcomes stabbing them all day long). For anyone whose in less extreme circumstances and whose backs are not against the wall - far more often than not most of our suffering seems to be a matter of adjustment. Completely different story with your SF lesbian getting mauled by a pitbull, residents at Japan's Unit 731 in China, anyone spending time in the right Russian gulags or Nazi internment camps in the middle of the last century, although there are people for whom keeping sanity and keeping their own moral bearing was so important to them that they still managed to pull through because it's all that mattered and whatever innovation it took to keep themselves alive in that sense they did it despite what efforts were needed or how insurmountable the odds seemed. Not everyone is that extreme about their autonomy (I've found that I am that way to some degree), but it's worth stating that in most people's situations resignation is optional.

[Waechter418]

Karma appears to be a chain-reaction, i.e. reacting on/to reactions (having a problem with karma? stop reacting....)