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syncro
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Enjoyed going back to the Stanford document. I don't why I could never bring myself to read it through. This week's assignment! I think I said that last year.
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Śaṅkara maintains an Upaniṣadic view that minds are materially constituted by sattva, the subtlest aspect of each primary element. Sattva has a qualitative predominance of lucidity and transparency. It makes the mind akin to the reflective surface of a mirror capable of reflecting light, or like a transparent glass that allows light to pass through while illuminating variations on its surface. Unlike minds, mediums like rocks are inert because of their opacity. They lack enough sattva constitution to be reflective even though they are also fundamentally grounded in consciousness.
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connectedcosmos
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Re: G N O S I S [Re: syncro] 2
#28323664 - 05/17/23 05:38 PM (8 months, 7 days ago) |
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It's such a good read I'll have to admit I haven't even read it all , most of what I did though is just so 
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Following his reading of the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, Śaṅkara likens the universe’s unmanifest state to īśvara in a cosmic state of deep dreamless sleep. Manifestation occurs when īśvara, as the intelligent cause, visualizes the universe through memory of past universes. This projective ontological capacity of īśvara is analogous to an individual’s process of dreaming. Dreaming utilizes memory to project a dream world that is not separate from one’s mind (BṛUBh 4.3.10). The universe is similarly an effortless manifestation of īśvara’s knowledge, and possesses no existence apart from īśvara. The universe’s ongoing manifestation is concurrent with īśvara’s perception of it like the dreamscape is concurrent with the dreamer’s perception. The universe’s very existence depends on īśvara knowing it, for īśvara’s knowing is its very projection into objective existence.
Tat tvam asi
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 54. The true nature of things is to be known personally , through the eyes of clear illumination and not through a sage : what the moon exactly is , is to be known with one's own eyes ; can another make him know it?
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syncro
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Quote:
Śaṅkara repudiates rival philosophies such as the Nyāya school which rejects witnessing consciousness and self-illumination in favor of other-illumination (paraprakāśa)—a thesis more akin to contemporary higher order theories. Nyāya argues that a second cognition is required to illumine the first. Śaṅkara’s basic counter-critique is that if a primary cognition requires a second apperceptive cognition to be known, then the second would require a third, etc., leading to a vicious infinite regression fallacy.
It seems agreeable, but the regression would form a circle, and we form loops. Does there need to be a hierarchy to origination?
The previous paragraph.
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Śaṅkara defines the intrinsic nature of consciousness as uniquely self-illuminating (svaprakāśa) because it does not require a second awareness for it to be known. Consciousness is intrinsically reflexive, immediate, and self-revealing in all cognition, while simultaneously remaining the non-object of knowledge. It is self-established in that it does not require a means of knowledge to be known, nor any proof or justification for its existence. It is self-disclosing. No second thing mediates its access to itself
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But he doesn't negate the two cognition standard. AI
You are correct, Shankara does not explicitly negate the possibility of two cognitions reflecting each other. His primary focus is on addressing the problem of infinite regression in the Nyaya school's position that each cognition requires another cognition to be known.
Shankara's argument is aimed at highlighting the issue of an infinite regress if every cognition relies on a subsequent cognition for its knowledge. He argues that if a primary cognition requires a second cognition to be known, then that second cognition would require a third, and so on, leading to an endless chain of dependencies.
However, while Shankara emphasizes the self-illumination of consciousness and the self-established nature of the witness, it is important to note that he does not outright reject the possibility of cognitions reflecting each other or having mutual awareness. His argument is primarily directed at addressing the infinite regress problem rather than providing a comprehensive account of all possible cognitive interactions.
In the context of his philosophy, Shankara's focus is on realizing the non-dual nature of reality and the self, and his arguments primarily revolve around establishing the self-illuminating nature of consciousness. While he may not explicitly discuss the two cognition standard, his emphasis on the self-establishment of consciousness implies that immediate cognition and self-revelation do not require an infinite chain of subsequent cognitions.
The Advaitan counter: Who is the we forming loops?
Why, the alternate cognitions. Who is the yard in which the dogs run? Another cognition. Two mirrors are sufficient to reflect one another infinitely.
'Experientially' the argument though is insufficient. The Void needs no reliance; Mahamudra rests on naught. all things it embraces and contains.
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syncro
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Re: G N O S I S [Re: syncro] 4
#28327423 - 05/20/23 10:33 AM (8 months, 4 days ago) |
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Finished Stanford paper. Some can get tedious and much was slow reading for me, but good throughout. Spoiling from last paragraphs.
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however, from a phenomenal perspective, liberation does not entail an annihilation of one’s experience of the world (BrSūBh 3.2.21). This is like a magician who remains unconfused despite perceiving their own magical illusions. The liberated person recognizes nonduality but continues living as an embodied individual experiencing the world. This lasts according to the ongoing fructification of karma in their present birth (ChUbh 6.14.2). One who is “living while liberated” (jīvanmukti) seamlessly inhabits the apparent paradoxes of being disembodied in the midst of embodiment, of acting while recognizing their non-agency, and of perceiving the world despite deindividuation. (See Fort 1998 on jīvanmukti).
A lucid dream experience is an ideal illustration of Śaṅkara’s liberation, though not found in his work. For experienced lucid dreamers, the recognition that one is dreaming possesses a conviction that completely cuts through the appearance of the dream fabric, but does so without eliminating perceptual dream experience. They are epistemically aware of two orders of reality, waking and dreaming, while phenomenally remaining in the less real dreaming order. The lucid dreamer is deindividuated from the dream body, yet remains embodied within the dream experience. They recognize that the dream is not separate from themselves, that it cannot touch them, and that there is nothing to fear or gain from it. In Śaṅkara’s metaphysical view however, the empirical order is analogous to īśvara’s dream, not one’s own. This view accommodates the universe’s identity with īśvara, along with intersubjective agreement and veridical cognition, without falling into solipsism. The individual is not creating empirical reality, but rather making a mistake about it. Like the dream, empirical reality is not illusory from within its own order of reality. It is known as a virtual appearance only from the more foundational perspective of knowing brahman, analogous to awakening to the reality of the dream. The liberated person is like a finite dream being within īśvara’s cosmic dream who has awakened within the dream. They recognize that the immediate presence of consciousness is the single foundation grounding all objects, the single self of all beings, and the self of īśvara.
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morrowasted
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Re: G N O S I S [Re: syncro]
#28327506 - 05/20/23 11:51 AM (8 months, 4 days ago) |
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Quote:
Why, the alternate cognitions. Who is the yard in which the dogs run? Another cognition. Two mirrors are sufficient to reflect one another infinitely.
if you want to read the same truth in like a million words that won to pulitzer half a century ago check out the book godel escher bach
Stubborn people like me need to sort through lots of big words before we can make sense of small amounts of small words
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syncro
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morrowasted
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Re: G N O S I S [Re: syncro]
#28327538 - 05/20/23 12:46 PM (8 months, 4 days ago) |
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Lol, I have that within my last 50 downloaded images. I read the book 18 years ago and haven't read it since, because I haven't needed to, but I refer back to that probably more than any other single text and set of images and abstractified music, which is what it actually is
I'm a mediocre visual artist but obviously a fan of Escher
I'm not deeply versed in mathematics but I am deeply versed in philosophy and symbolic logic and I'm a huge fan of gordel because you have to be an imbecile not to be if you actually understand logic
I played piano for all of 18 months when I was a kid and don't remember how to do any of it at all so my appreciation of bach purely qualitative
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morrowasted
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Poorer than a pig slyer than a snake weirder than a walrus dumber than a dino: more .honest .. thæn ...hæyou'll
By No body
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morrowasted
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History in both the Old and New Testaments is perceived through a glass darkly, in Paul’s own words, distorted by the political bias and religious imperatives of the redactors. The diversity of worship described in Jeremiah in the time of the Kings comes to us through the Yahwistic gloss of the exilic authors in Babylon, sharpened by Zoroastrian apocalyptic ideas, replacing the Hebrew notion of Sheol with a future purification by fire in the end of days, leading to the stark contrast of Heaven and Hell. This originated from the time Cyrus allowed the Jews in exile to return to Israel, where they instituted a more fundamentalistic paradigm, ordering the men of Israel to forsake their gentile wives.
“And Shechaniah … answered and said unto Ezra, We have trespassed against our God, and have taken strange wives of the people of the land: yet now there is hope in Israel concerning this thing. Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives, and such as are born of them, according to the counsel of my lord, and of those that tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law” (Ezra 10:2).
Between the 10th century BCE and the beginning of their exile in 586 BCE, polytheism was normal throughout Israel. It was only after the exile that worship of Yahweh alone became established, and possibly only as late as the time of the Maccabees (2nd century BCE) that monotheism became universal among the Jews”.
Likewise, we know Christian history is a distorted tale, firstly of the supplanting of the original following of Yeshua by born again Pauline revisionism under threat of the anathema maranatha despite Paul having no direct knowledge of the events, or the key character involved, and then by the orthodox victors who suppressed the Valentinian gnostics and many others, causing the Nag Hammadi texts to be buried in jars until the 20th century, just as later developments like the Nicene creed and the Trinity also constitute confabulations of Yeshua’s mission.
Edom was a nominally Arab culture whose original female deities, al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat who continued to be worshipped in Mecca up to the time of Muhammad, along with Dhushara the Lord of Seir. Gen 32:3 “And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother unto the land of Seir, the country of Edom”.
In the wake of Alexander cutting a military swathe across the Near East and the ensuing Seleucid empire, these deities were imbued with Greek personae as can be seen in the architectural forms of Nabateaen deities, where the female deities took on Greek forms like Tyche and Dhushara became a Dionysian deity whose tragic mask had the power to confer immortal life.
Israel, Nabatea and surrounding lands all spoke the Aramaic language of Syria. This was the language of Yeshua in Galilee and this was the language of the Nabateans. Galilean Aramaic is noted in Peter’s exposure: “And a little after, they that stood by said again to Peter, Surely thou art one of them: for thou art a Galilaean, and thy speech agreeth thereto.” (Mark 14:11) Deuteronomy notes of Jacob "A wandering Aramaean was my father". The word Aram goes right back to the Mari texts of the twelfth century BCE. The whole area around Israel was in a state of inter-communication through commerce and a common language. The rulers of Nabatea and the Herodian dynasty closely intermarried. There was a Jewish population scattered throughout and on all sides diverse beliefs. Nabatea held its own celebrations and religious festivals "on every high hill and under every green tree" as the Jewish curse against the nations goes...
The Dionysian connection pervaded the Near East with the rise of Alexander and the ensuing Greek empires and became integral to Syria and Nabatea. Dhushara was an ancient Arabic deity originally represented by a simple stone block in a similar manner to the worship of a stone pillar at Bethel by Jacob , as a non iconic face of the abstract God, as Yahweh was.
Gen 35:14: “Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had spoken with him, a pillar of stone; and he poured out a drink offering on it, and poured oil on it”. However with the rise of Nabatean commerce and viticulture, Dhushara gained the persona of the Greek Dionysus, just as al-Uzza, al-lat and Manat gained the forms of Tyche, Atargatis and Aphrodite. Nabatean culture had shrines scattered far and wide across the fertile landscape."
In complete contrast, in The Gospel of Thomas, which begins “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death” Yeshua says he is NOT the disciples master, but they are drunk on his Dionysian spring:
Thom (13) Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like." Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a righteous angel." Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher." Thomas said to him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like." Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out.” Again a Dionysian metaphor, but also a veridical declaration of truth.
The end of days is not an end but is as it was in the beginning.
Thom (18) The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us how our end will be." Jesus said, "Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end? For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death."
Nevertheless he reinforces that he is there to provoke conflict and conflagration:
Thom (16) Jesus said, "Men think, perhaps, that it is peace which I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know that it is dissension which I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword, and war. For there will be five in a house: three will be against two, and two against three, the father against the son, and the son against the father. And they will stand solitary.”
Yet he will do this by instilling new vision:
Thom (17) Jesus said, "I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind."
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Buster_Brown
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instilling new vision:
Thom (17) Jesus said, "I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind."
So like ' there are more things in heaven and earth then are dreamt of in my philosophy' and we are basically kept in the dark to some degree.
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morrowasted
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He also says that you are the light of the world.
A light is only useful when it is used in a darkness.
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morrowasted
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"...Milavec (2021) notes the progression in the view of Christ’s descent, which undergoes an apocalyptic extrapolation as time ensues. In Acts 2:23, Peter says that Christ “was not abandoned by God in Hades [ο τε νκατελείφθη ε ς ιδην],” but says nothing about Jesus preaching in Hades. In 1 Peter however this is specifically described:
“By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, which sometime were disobedient, when once the long suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. ” (3:20)
Justin Martyr (d. 165 C.E.) claims it is the Jews who had died prior to the coming of Jesus: “The Lord God remembered his dead people of Israel who lay in their graves, and he descended to preach to them his salvation” (Dial. 72.4). The intent here appears to be that the good news of the soon-to-arrive Kingdom of God was being shared with the hundreds of thousands of those Jews from Abraham to John the Baptist. Even though they are admittedly laying in their graves, they receive the message of God’s future salvation intended for those “sleeping” in hope. Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 C.E.) tells that the Apostles, following their own deaths, descended into Hades where they preached to the pagan philosophers who had lived righteous lives (Strom. VI, 6:45, 5). The third-century Gospel of Bartholomew portrays the “King of Glory” as descending the stairs of a thousand steps into the underworld. Hades, the god of the underworld, is trembling uncontrollably as he descends. Jesus “shattered the iron bars” of the gates of Hades and grabs the god Hades himself and pummels him “with a hundred blows and bound him with fetters that cannot be loosed” in an operation to save “Adam and all the patriarchs”. When Christ meets Adam, he specifically says: “I was hung upon the cross for your sake and for the sake of your children”, establishing the backwards causality.
The Catholic Catechism states this forward and backward causality from end to end of time. “In his human soul united to his divine person, the dead Christ went down to the realm of the dead. He opened Heaven's gates for the just who had gone before him.” His death is claimed to have freed from exclusion from Heaven the just who had gone before him: "It is precisely these holy souls who awaited their Saviour in Abraham's bosom whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into Hell”, echoing the words of the Roman Catechism, His death was of no avail to the damned.
"By the expression 'He descended into Hell', the Apostles' Creed confesses that Jesus did really die and through his death for us conquered death and the devil 'who has the power of death' (Hebrews 2:14):
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham.
Given this annihilating redemptive power over the devil, it remains opaque why deadly sin is still deemed to exist.
This Hellenistic view of the underworld extends from the Synoptic Gospels through to Revelation:
"And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades; for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day." (Matt 11:23, Luke 10:15).
"I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death." (Revelation 1:18)
"The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death [D'evil-power] and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works." (Revelation 20:13)
In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus the beggar, Luke 16 has Yeshua referring to Hades in a manner that anticipates the punishments of Hell in the Day of Judgment, pre-ordaining it for the guilty as an antechamber of woe. Versions of the Bible continue to predominantly refer to this as Hades or “the dead”, with only King James using Hell:
"And being in tormented in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented”.
The Gospel of Matthew allegorically relates that MANY PEOPLE rose from the dead, and after the resurrection walked about in Jerusalem and were seen by many people there:
“And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and MANY BODIES OF THE SAINTS WHICH SLEPT AROSE AND CAME OUT OF THE GRAVE AFTER HIS RESURRECTION, AND WENT INTO THE HOLY CITY, and appeared unto many. Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God”. (Matt. 27:53)..."
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