tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post2806969705584490811..comments2024-03-01T14:27:35.794-08:00Comments on Albion Awakening: What is The Spiritual?Bruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post-74046416746451224002017-11-09T18:44:27.185-08:002017-11-09T18:44:27.185-08:00The core problem with the definition of spirit in ...The core problem with the definition of <i>spirit</i> in terms of what it is <i>not</i> is that it risks putting "spirit" into the general category of concepts that express the absence of something that definitely exists.<br /><br />Dark, cold, crude, amorphous, empty, and of course all things modified by the prefix "in-" or the suffix "-less". These are concepts of holes or gaps, they describe the nothingness that is left behind when you remove the thing that is verifiable in principle. In computer lingo, we might refer to null or nil, a 'value' that indicates that no memory has been allocated to storing a value for the variable (or that it has been deallocated).<br /><br />Spirit is not distinct from matter in this simple negative sense, it is <i>not</i> what is left behind when you remove matter. You don't become more spiritual by removing your brain, or any of the rest of your body. <i>Mere</i> matter is not spiritual, but matter does not exclude spirit. You become more spiritual to submitting to laws <i>higher</i> than those which affect mere matter, not by evading or negating physics.<br /><br />An airplane flies not because it has no mass and thus is unaffected by the laws of gravity, but because the matter, with its physical property of mass, is arranged so as to allow the wings, engine, and control surfaces to derive lift, propulsion, and directed responses to overcome weight, drag, and inertial ballistics. Effective use of this refinement of cruder physical laws requires a pilot to fly the aircraft. The pilot is not simply another part of the plane (even in the case of "autonomous" aircraft, where much of the basic principles of piloting are built into the aircraft). The pilot is something apart from the aircraft itself, but not everything that is not the aircraft is the pilot.<br /><br />Animal are organized from mere physical matter to carry out activity directed to some objective (survival and reproduction, chiefly). Spirituality is that quality that results from mere animals being further organized to allow them to effectively utilize higher laws to express volitional activity beyond the limitations of dead matter.<br /><br />The difficulty is which volitions are <i>effective</i> in utilizing higher law, and which are not. An aircraft that has been shot down or lost its pilot is no less subject to the more refined laws of aerodynamics which are necessary to understanding the motion of an aircraft in flight, it is just easier to express its subsequent motion adequately in terms of the simpler laws...it is no longer flying, only <i>falling</i>. To understand spirituality, we must understand and identify the difference between that higher organization which allows controlled flight and that which, by those same laws, allows only spiritual falling.<br /><br />All human attempts fall short because of the desire to carve out an exemption large enough to ignore that we ourselves tend to fall rather than fly. Yes, we are subject to all the same metaphysical laws that allow spiritual flight...but for the most part the calculation of our inevitable trajectory requires little more than those which describe falling.Chiu ChunLinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03519192610708043962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post-13270731670839957932017-11-08T02:15:32.251-08:002017-11-08T02:15:32.251-08:00@David, as I recall, nearly 20 years ago you were ...@David, as I recall, nearly 20 years ago you were a participant in some in-depth interviews I did in attempting to get a working-definition of The Spiritual for psychological research. <br /><br />Our conclusion then was that we could not find any useful definition. <br /><br />In the end, we just used self-evaluation along the lines of 'Are you spiritual? Yes or No...' But that was merely kicking the can further down the road...Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post-7288038681666261802017-11-08T01:35:45.274-08:002017-11-08T01:35:45.274-08:00Fascinating post and discussion. Again, it is reas...Fascinating post and discussion. Again, it is reassuring to know that my lifelong strong tendencies to intuit that the spiritual is really real, id not an idiosynchratic delusion - a perspective that the world seems desperate to impose on me, and largely successfully, where it not for the knowledge that others can also percieve the denied reality behind the material world! If I didnt have that knowledge, I suspect I would have given up my ideas as purely fanciful a long time ago. The erosive effects of living within nihilism as a cultural philosophy make me feel like I am lost in space and a long way from home, floating ever further into the darkness. But then, here we all are, and we seem to perceive what many cannot or will not.<br /><br />As synchronicity might have it, only yesterday, I had been musing on a definition of how to define 'spiritual' and observed that I could apprehend it experientially as real as an act of thought, but attempting to adequately cloth such perceptions in words eluded me and also felt unneccessary or altering the character of the thing itself to constrain it with language. It had occurred to me to post here to ask you for an attempted definition, but then, your post today beat me to it...coincidence?!<br /><br />I think poetry alone has the power to go someway towards revealing the transcendent but then that too is something modernity no longer understands or values.David Balfourhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12099160562774064281noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post-55778678887165887862017-11-07T09:58:51.125-08:002017-11-07T09:58:51.125-08:00@NLR - Mathematics certainly has been linked with ...@NLR - Mathematics certainly has been linked with a spirituality - Pythagoras is perhaps the first named example, although probably many earlier instances were found in the civilisations that display geometric fascinations - eg. Ancient Egyptian or Neolithic British. <br /><br />This has faded out, and mathematics has also declined massively in its social status and centrality to education (currently mathematics is, like all other institutional forms, being abolished in favour of the single linked-bureaucracy of 'converged' political correctness). <br /><br />I believe that if future consciousness becomes established (i.e. Final Participation, divine consciousness); then systems of communication (language, symbolism, pictures, geometry, mathematics) will - as FP increases in strngth and sustainability - gradually lose their role as spiritual intermediaries; happening as direct knowing takes-over. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post-24949438625284049282017-11-07T09:50:04.452-08:002017-11-07T09:50:04.452-08:00@William - my point is that the 'boundary'...@William - my point is that the 'boundary' between material and immaterial has shifted enormously through history. The spiritual is continuous-with the material: there is one creation.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post-70974964013996059602017-11-07T09:26:07.469-08:002017-11-07T09:26:07.469-08:00It does seem mathematics has some connection with ...It does seem mathematics has some connection with spirituality, though I am not sure exactly what. Partly because mathematics certainly doesn't fit into the materialistic worldview since it deals with infinity and more than three dimensions. I suspect that is why there is so much effort towards trying to reduce mathematical proofs and mathematical thinking in general to a mechanistic process. If it could be shown that mathematics doesn't describe a reality but is just formal symbol manipulation, than the threat to materialism is gone. In fact, in volume 3 of his collected works, Godel (who believed in God, the mind (as opposed to the brain), and the reality of mathematics) wrote that he believed his discovery of his incompleteness theorems was due to the fact that he was looking for them, i.e. he did not have a conviction that mathematics *must* be reducible to the syntax of language.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7154359965221795553.post-52015401732866251392017-11-07T08:23:03.705-08:002017-11-07T08:23:03.705-08:00It's very hard to define the spiritual partly ...It's very hard to define the spiritual partly I believe because it is what is. Calling it consciousness or formless reality doesn't really get us very far. Perhaps the best we can do is say it is what is revealed by intuition. Perhaps the reason we can deny it is because we can't define it by any of the normal means at our disposal, words, thoughts and the like.William Wildbloodhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13231219533755925897noreply@blogger.com