Saturday, July 24, 2010

Some notes on Modern Pantheism - Part 1

These notes were originally written in a Facebook Pantheism group in early January 2009.
I'm reposting them here for several reasons; I lost them once already when the FB account was arbitrarily deleted, and it took me a while to recover it. The group wasn't particularly interesting as feedback went, and it was also badly moderated, with posts deleted for no sensible reason. And you can't point anyone to them who's not using FB.

So here they are, with a little editing.

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1) Religions, religions... let's not even talk about religions, which I see as just means of controlling people, not teaching them, let's just talk about belief systems.

Up to not so many years ago, no matter how much you knew, you looked out at night, saw the stars. Have you ever thought what_you_ would make of that if you had _no_ idea whatsoever what they are?
Sure, if you were "educated" you could work out their movements, calendars, eclipses, you still hadn't a clue what they were about.
(Of course, try that now, most of you probably can't, you live in urban environments, but back then most of them did every night, and you all know how it looks when you can really see it).


So imagine you live back then, outside a city, you see that every night, you really have no idea what it is, no-one can tell you.
What sort of belief system do you make up?

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2) Nowadays we have good reason to believe we know what they are.
Billions of immense masses of gas slowly burning down, arranged in galactic mainly spirally patterns. And we also have good reason to believe that we live on a little planet circling one of those burning gas masses.

We can also see that all those patterns, and down to the atomic level most patterns around us and within us, seem to resemble incredibly simple mathematical formulas which at some level or other resemble... well, everything :)



Now, what sort of belief system can you make up from this outlook?

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3) So take the basic pantheist tenet, Everything is God, God is Everything.

Filter it through a belief system that sees yourself at the center of it all and the unexplainable stars around you.

Or filter it through one that sees you as a little part of very interesting and look-alike-everything patterns.

You get rather different pantheist concepts, don't you?

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4) What's consciousness?
We don't know.
You could read all of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
(if you can get past the second paragraph, which I find particularly obnoxious)
and I guess the conclusion would be, we don't know.
If anyone here knows, please let me know.

*
(These things [ ] basically mean "you can skip this unless you read it a second time")
[ That second paragraph, though, is basically talking about what I call "restricted consciousness", and includes all the first three stages of Vedantic consciousness. (see Vedanta on that same page).
It's fine for catching rabbits to eat, being productive, resting, even having fun.
The fourth stage is what I call "expanded consciousness". Good for going a bit beyond the bare necessities of life, but not for being productive in any material sense.
They seem to be mutually exclusive, or at least interfere a lot.
See
http://donbcilly.blogspot.com/2010/07/rabbit-theory.html

Still, I guess we can take Descartes's "cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am, as giving us a common ground on what we call consciousness, and agreement on the fact that we have it.
But why do we have it, whatever it is?
I think that
consciousness accretes to shapes. It aggregates to them, fills them, whatever.
It is actually in the fabric of things, of the universe, something like the c constant of physics.
The more complex the shape, the more complex the consciousness.
It's a bit difficult to explain, unless it's already clear to you, think about it for a moment and leave it for a few days.
It may come to you.
It took me awhile to digest it, and it was my intuition.

So, we (humans) have got it.
Just about 100% of people will agree to this.
Even if we don't know what it is, we'll agree we are conscious.
As you start to ask people around you, has a cat got it, a plant, a car, a stone, you'll probably find the percentage going down sharply.
But why should we human beings be so special that we have it and other things don't?
No reason for it, really, is there?
If anyone here knows of a reason, please let me know.
(outside Deist or "Man is king of the Universe" sort of stuff).

But does it do it totally "randomly"?
In my view... no.
It does it according to "music", and the same "music" (see below for a definition) also makes shapes accrete.

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5) Soul-music.
(the "soul", "music", and "information").

Note 1: Another good word for "music" in this sense could be "magic", but that can be even _more_ confusing due to its other uses so I'll avoid it.

Note 2: This may take a little while to digest, too :)

Again, try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul
Just skim it, roll the mouse moderately fast down to the bottom.
Right. Difficult concept.

So, if we take that concept very loosely and move it to "music"?
The soul concept is a bit restrictive. It doesn't take into account multiple, interconnected consciousness.
Nor the fact that it, too, can disperse just about completely at death, rather than migrating into another form, or another state, as a whole.
It can still migrate while dispersing (and not just at death), according to "music", or the interaction of "information", in the particle physics sense.
And it can still accrete while migrating (and not just at conception, although a lot of music certainly goes into conception), but not into single shapes, or consciousnesses, except maybe in very exceptional cases.
Birth is rather irrelevant in a soul-music sense, except of course as a (conscious) experience.
Which modifies the music. And makes it interact differently. And so on.
It is my belief that the music in us, and the way it interacts with other music, modifies our information, during life.
Steve Hawking had to concede that in physics, information survives black holes, even if matter and energy do not.

This information is what survives our death and determines how our music will accrete to other shapes (plural) to make up their consciousness.
It's very similar to the classic soul-and-reincarnation concept, except the soul is not seen as surviving death as a "single" entity, but dispersing and re-accreting.

The way I see it, it does not do so just at death but throughout our lives. Reproduction is a typical example (note Carlos Castaneda's concept by Don Juan when he says that "every time you conceive a child a part of your luminous being is lost") but not just that, just about everything we do changes our music.

Just as very little of our physical body is the same as it was even a few years ago, we change most of our cells, so it is for our soul-music.
It's only consciousness that gives us a semblance of an identity, and that is pretty much an illusion.

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