h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

would it not be better to try to understand it than to "explain" it?

<quote>
Disjunctive syllogism (Logic), one in which the major proposition is disjunctive; as, the earth moves in a circle or an ellipse; but it does not move in a circle, therefore it moves in an ellipse.

So one or other of the statements has to be true!

1. The universe either had (a) a beginning or (b) no beginning.
Do we know if either of these statements is true? No!

2. If it had a beginning, the beginning was either (a) caused or (b) uncaused.
Do we know if either of these statements is true? No!

3. If it had a cause, the cause was either (a) personal or (b) not personal.
Do we know if either of these statements is true? No!

Please, no more Kalam!



Blue/Green Alji

hi badger,

The quote says 'attempt to explain'. Yes, trying to understand can also be quite interesting at times - it also keeps us perky.

az

Hi Alji. In that case, no more ancient Indians eh?!

Hi Badger. Mathematics is intersubjective not objective. It is a human invention and somewhat arbitrary in the end. Jordan will tell you the same thing!

What is this supposed to mean: "I have seen the calculations that prove the principle of infinity, that not only make sense of the physical universe but are drawn from proveable and repeatable scientific experiments."?

What is the 'principle of infinity'? Who did these calculations? How can a calculation be 'drawn' from an experiment? Why should an experiment be 'proveable'?

Thank you Alji , as I wrote void and vaccum different things.
So thank you for validation.

I used the nearest word I could summon up to describe the 'outside of time' and could only come up with void as as closest to a description of the 'nothingness' outside of time and space
I a voided using the word vaccum because it isn't
It was Toxx brought the vaccum into the equation and now I'm having to use it to clean up.

Mathematics do not work outside of time and space, but they are the only objective tools within time and space that are reliable and not a matter of opinion.
The quirks of some of Jordans' 'weird' maths are when mathematics are applied to things outside of time and space.
Such as a hypercube.
There maths becomes subjective.

It interested me that when I asked Hoo repeatedly to explain to me his understanding of a hypercube - tesseract, he did not reply other than to say he had no opinion.
Because of his experiences within the physical, he does not look at math applied outside the physical ,because it begins to fall apart.

Morning all. Real-time work calls rather urgently, but the last few entries need affirming. This thread certainly beats soaps, indeed, keeping the ageing grey cells sparkling along.

We humans have a deeply conditioned need, it seems, to "understand" and "explain." Both of which require "objectivity," a certain removal from that which is to be understood. However, just as the eyeball cannot see itself, nor the tongue taste itself etc., there are some areas of our experience which cannot be "understood" or "explained," because they are, ultimately, that which seeks to understand and explain.

OK, so the language is getting a bit mystical again. But the really interesting area of what is loosely called "spirituality," is not the fuzzy business of "spiritual" experiences, voices, visions and all that sensational stuff, but rather the intuition of 'being' itself, which cannot ultimately be "understood", because we ARE being, which turns out to be inseparable from consciousness. The Vedanta calls this Sat Chit Ananda ( being, consciousness, bliss ).

Anyway, this thread started out as GOD, fact or fiction, and recently has become interestingly stuck on the question of whether or not the observed universe had a beginning in time, and if so, what was "before" that, and why did it start, and "who" started it.

As I said a few entries ago, all of this hangs on one's "belief" in time as a reality. But what if time has no "reality" other than as an aspect of our perception of space. What if nothing has a reality apart from our perception of it. What if "nothing" is our perception of reality. What if consciousness is all there is. What if consciousness is inseparable from what we intuit as the Divine, God, or whatever we choose to call the inexplicable vastness that infinitely surrounds this little spark of light we call "knowledge." What if we are nothing but That, and That is what we call God.

I know the pieces fit
Because I watched them fall away
The poetry that comes from the squaring off between,
And the circling is worth it.
Finding beauty in the dissonance.

Chia

"As I said a few entries ago, all of this hangs on one's "belief" in time as a reality. But what if time has no "reality" other than as an aspect of our perception of space. What if nothing has a reality apart from our perception of it. What if "nothing" is our perception of reality. What if consciousness is all there is. What if consciousness is inseparable from what we intuit as the Divine, God, or whatever we choose to call the inexplicable vastness that infinitely surrounds this little spark of light we call "knowledge." What if we are nothing but That, and That is what we call God."

I've been saying that for a few thousand posts, but not as eloquently

That is a summing up of the knowledge which I 'imagined or not' during a near death experience.

Nothing is 'real' except in our conscious desire to make it real.
Particles of conscious material are the building bricks of our will to create the 'environment' we inhabit.
What a person expects is what will happen on an individual basis.
Those who expect negative events will experience just that and vice versa.
We all 'choose' our destiny and then forget we have made the choice. otherwise the experience would not 'feel' real.
Pain and suffering is just as much a valid experience, because they actually can bring a person to a place of remembering AKA as enlightenment.
Every single thing that we experience is a gift, sometimes only in retrospect and sometimes difficult to appreciate because being here in the physical means living with a nervous system that is designed to protect us from harm through the feeling of pain but can also at times feel intolerable.
But without pain, we would not survive, so is that a gift or not?

We don't 'discover' the 'truth' we simply remember it.
That is why when a 'spark of understanding feels 'right' it's because we have always known it to be.
nobody else can do that for us, nobody can remember the rules for us and pass them on. Memory is an individual thing.

I would go one step further. We are Truth. Just as we are God and we are Enlightenment. There is nothing other than That. And That is what plays hide and seek with Itself in the divine game of diversity. To awaken to That ( which is the first glimmer of "enlightenment") is to realise that that truth is the truth of our being.

Sorry, folks, you will just have to bear with some mystical utterances here for which science ,as yet, has no measuring tools.

here's a poem, written a couple of days ago, when that "unity" overtook my awareness, ( and doubtless my parietal lobes were out cold.)

NO SEPARATION

Supporting all, none more, none less -
The shopping and the chestnut tree,
The magpie&#8217;s chatter, litter, grass,
This body that appears as me,
The sunshine, concrete footpath, wind
And leaves, parked cars, impartially
Are all revealed in being, one,
Each separate wave, one boundless sea.

There is an old Buddhist sutra which states, " When enlightenment dawns, there is no-one to gain enlightenment. Nothing is gained, nothing is lost, that which is, is recognised for what it is." Or words to that effect. Indeed, as you say, it is a kind of remembering. The Tibetan Buddhists call it,"remembering your original face."

sorry about the mess in line three of the poem.(Thanks, Microsoft.) Here it is again, cleaned up.

NO SEPARATION

Supporting all, none more, none less -
The shopping and the chestnut tree,
The magpie&#8217;s chatter, litter, grass,
This body that appears as me,
The sunshine, concrete footpath, wind
And leaves, parked cars, impartially
Are all revealed in being, one,
Each separate wave, one boundless sea.

bugger, it did it again, despite re-typing. Too bad.

Hi blickybadger .

I see that you are having a moment .

"I may not be able to remember if it was Coprunicus or Gallileo or some other renaisance naturalist and astronomer who decided to stand up and say that the earth orbited the sun but for three hundred years the Vatican stuck to flawed subjective logic to deny the truth."

I believe that it was Copernicus. However he was not the first by a long way. Ancient Egyptians, some Greeks, the Druids and certain Meso-American cultures all deduced this long before Copernicus, and that the earth was in all probability round (still not proven as far as I can see ). Strangely, in each case it was Christianity that suppressed this heretical information. After all it would have disproved Catholic dogma and thus the infallibility of the Pope...oooer!

"There is no god get over it."

As yet an uproven hypothesis at best. Just because the Kalam may be flawed does not disprove the existence of the divine in whatever form we are capable of perceiving it.

"The sooner people abandon the shackles of dogma the better. "

Absolutely, couldn't agree more. Something I have been arguing for the last 5,000 posts .

"I like the spiritual slant this thread has been taking. I think we ought to seek out a greater understanding of our need or impulse to believe in gods and pixies and whatever. "

I agree, though I feel that the reason you wish to 'seek out a greater understanding', may differ significantly from mine. Maybe it isn't a 'need or impulse' but an awareness that there is far more to the universe than our present scientific/rational understanding can provide.

Some people here recognise, through experience rather than just 'blind faith', that there may yet be more in heaven and earth than is catered for by your philosophy.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Or being unplugged from the matrix

Hmmm...being somebody who went to catholic schools (although I'm not one myself) and studied christian theology I am really pleased that for once, somebody isn't trying to make everybody else 'believe' the myth of the bible stories and is actually having a rational discussion about it! Well done that creature!!

I personally think religion is the biggest form of oppression and the biggest control tool used on people to justify themselves when all other laws of the multiverse say they are being complete nutters.
It causes more wars and general upset than anything else and is chopped up into convenient little propaganda quotes to persuade people that yes, what we are doing is RIGHT cos the bible said so. The mere fact that the bible is largely made up of hand-me-down stories which culminate in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke which were written decades after events occurred (and which are all really similar to each other, which makes any normal person question their legitimacy as stand alone accounts) doesn't seem to bother these people. It is conveniently forgotten.

There are other avenues I could go down in this discussion but for now I'll leave them alone as the main gripe I have is with people (and unfortunately, it is the all saintly Christians I have experienced this with time after time, so no complaints of religious bigotry here folks) forcing their personal views down my throat and then GETTING P****D OFF when I don't agree with them. The whole, 'this is my way and it should be yours' mentality gets me angry anyway, but the christians are by far the worst offenders in my experience. To be so completely arrogant as to say that you are Right and Saved and that everybody else has a Duty to be Right and Saved just like you astounds me. Now I'm not saying it's all of the god-squad but like everything else, there are 2 sides to everything and this is the bad one. I'm sure there are (and I know some) christians out there who do operate a live and let live policy, who don't accost strangers on the street and tell them through a fixed smile with glazed eyes that they need to Repent and Find God. I'm sure that there are even a few who haven't even SEEN a promotionary pamphlet telling us Ungodly types that we NEED salvation and MUST believe what the church says we should do. For those precious few, I apologise if you think I'm being harsh. As for the rest...

I don't believe in God the Man. I know that Jesus was not the Son of God the Man. I know he didn't come back to life again after his little dose of capital punishment dealt to him for inciting trouble and breaching the peace with his popular spin on existing religious teachings. I know that the bible accounts were written generations after he died and are highly suspicious as accurate accounts of events, due to the 'Chinese Whispers' element of storytelling. I also know that my eternal soul isn't damned because I was never baptised and Saved from my original sin, which incidentally, I don't believe I got from Eve either.

I believe in freedom to believe in what I like without somebody trying to 'convert' me to believing something else. I know that Jesus was a real historical figure, that he was a popular preacher teaching people existing religion in a new and refreshing way. I know that he was executed for breaching the peace and defacing a temple and that the authorites saw him as a danger to public order and someone who was trying to incit unrest. I know that the teachings of the church regarding contraception are just impractical to a modern society and that I don't conform to the vast majority of church rules because you don't get to have any fun if you try to live by a lot of them and I won't be told what to do by any institution.

There endeth the lesson. Hope I haven't shattered any illusions.

..very interesting, all this...
But I'm concerned about the idea that consciousness is 'all' there is, and that people make their own reality. While I agree that there seems to be an interplay between how I perceive/act in the outside world, and the feed-back that I get , I do feel that there is an external reality that exists independently of me.
And I can't believe that people have 'chosen' to suffer at any level.

dont belve in god the devil or any other thing like that

Sorry..that sounded more 'blunt' than I intended
It's just that when I look at the suffering of others that has very definite and perceivable 'causes' (often the unmoderated use of force by the more powerful towards the vulnerable, exercised by individual, group or state) then I find it hard to place the responsibility for that on those who suffer it...