it's not separate from you to receive prayers. You can't disappoint it because it has no expectations. You can't be judged by it because it's not a judge. It's the very awareness within which the concepts of judgment arise and pass away.
This is very close to "apophatic theology", which I define as talking about Being via what it is not. There's a second way of talking about Being ("cataphatic"), namely how it reconciles spectra of things that are. In the first way, the Monad isn't even a monad or a plurality because those are words for emanated things: it is both undivided and unmixed. It's not separate from us, and it's not joined to us. It's not expecting, and it's not failing either. It's not judging and it's not judged. It's not awareness and it's not lethe. In the second way of talking, we do use words like this recognizing that they describe aspects that are transcended and harmonized, and that form of speech is common and valid as well.
What bothers churchmen is that speaking of the attribute of impersonality carries a risk that we demote the attribute of personality. Ultimately this need not be done, but so many have created an impersonal god in their own imaginations and gone far astray in everyone else's judgment that there is a warning against it. Francis Schaeffer took the bull by the horns by writing Beyond Personality to awaken Christians to this reality; he might interest you!
What's the purpose of institutions claiming to speak for God? The entire structure of religious authority collapses when people realize that the deepest truth isn't a being you need intermediaries to reach, but the very awareness you already are. The political implications are staggering.
Good human institutions only survive because they humbly refuse to speak for God. "Nature" speaks for itself, though we call it impersonal, and all revelation works the same way. Yet people who can't get the experience of monism right ("general revelation") need not to be too assertive when describing an experience of "special revelation".
there exists a reality so fundamental that even Yahweh, the biblical creator, is merely a distant shadow of it.
I would say instead that "Creator" and "Yahweh" and "Reality" and "Fundament" and "Distance" are all shadows that only approximate; no merely human word is final. Our always striving to know reality better allows our words to be sufficient and actionable without being exhaustive. But what's happened (and it started with Jews inventing "Ein Sof" or "Infinity" IMHO) is that people who find one label insufficient for one purpose then put their trust in ... another label. I kept seeking the root of it all and realized I could never apprehend the root and remain myself. I then started using all the words as shadows of various states of being, and I recognized that they fit together into many different isomorphic structures. In the structure you posit above, "Reality" is Fundamental and "Yahweh" and "Creator" are Distant, which might be true in many applications, but the words could be rearranged several ways to yield many truths in other applications, and all the arrangements have nuanced meaning and value without contradiction.
Now, let's take a look at the Gospel of the Egyptians which goes further, explaining that all creator gods, including the one who made our physical universe, are just source. There exists a hierarchy, God at the top, angels below, humans at the bottom.
That is indeed Near East divine-council theory, but it seems like it cuts against the idea that we never use the word "God" for the "Top". Whatever is revealed to us is mediated by our incompleteness and so in one sense we can never know what is beyond and in another sense we can know "God" or any "Thing" with sufficient, actionable substance.
John reveals "before anything existed, the Monad was.". Not in the beginning, God created.
I don't see a contradiction, they both sound like John 1:1-3.
Genesis gives us a God who speaks, who walks in the garden, who gets angry, who makes plans. But, the Monad doesn't speak because it's the silence from which all words emerge. It doesn't create because it is the space within which all creation unfolds. Are you beginning to see the difference between the Monad and El?
No, in the fundamentals I don't. By calling it Monad and Silence and Space you're applying labels that simply put it at a different pole of the spectrum of being than calling it God and Speaker and Creator. Genesis uses a lot of personal language (because personality came from somewhere and isn't a power that creatures have over the Monad), but it doesn't lead to contradiction, but paradox (i.e. something resolvable via nuance). For instance after the general introduction we are told that the Spirit broods (silently) before a Word is said (audibly). But the word for brooding and the word for speaking both come down to the same phenomenon, vibration in waves, expressed differently. So silence and speech are set by the text as a paradox, and we now have a scientific ("gnostic") way of resolving the paradox with nuance.
I would argue this is consciousness that's present before any thought appears, during the thought and after it disappears. Thoughts don't create this awareness. They manifest within it. Now imagine that awareness without any thoughts at all, without any content whatsoever, infinite and eternal. That is the Monad.
Okay, the experience is real, and the imaginative extrapolation is useful to a point, but not to all points. To say the Monad "is" awareness without thoughts is merely to apply a perceived experience to the whole of reality, which falls short because the map is never the territory.
beyond any boundaries
Yeah, I discovered that if there are boundaries they are indiscernible.
the invisible light
Use of paradox then, which is not monad but dyad and synthesis.
There's no divine command, no big bang, no let there be light moment.
Well, when we look at history there's an origin to spacetime, but there are still lots of views about that (including denying it).
you don't serve the Monad in the way a created being serves a creator. Not the way the Church and every religion on earth teaches. We're witnessing the natural overflow of infinite consciousness recognizing itself in ever-expanding ways.
Here the paradox is that if we were to teach how the Monad is served we would be just another religion. So in one sense the Monad cannot be served, but in another sense you truly imply we do serve the Monad somewhere between the Me (experience) and the Myself (reflection). That is because we could say the Monad "is" the Me and "is" the Myself and "is" the service. That gets us back to all relative words having a natural pattern of active, inactive, action (lover, beloved, love). That pattern is, however, isomorphic with the pattern of All being One. So, having beheld the Monad, and having beheld the Other (reflection) that is Self that have a relationship (reflective surface), we rejoice in the beholding, but when we come back to speaking English to our fellow man we end up using words that are like those already spoken, sometimes better and often worse. And all those words have sufficiency and substantiality without needing perfection or exhaustiveness. And that's what we build bridges on.
Bridge-building is finding agreements between people of diverse experiences.
Your take on me is accurate enough in so many words, but part of the bridge-building involves recognizing that what I mean by Yahweh is not what you've come to believe Yahweh is. If there's a Monad, and also a part-time architect named Samael, I think the title or name Yahweh better describes the Monad. You seem to have become so familiar with assuming that Samael is automatically Yahweh that when I seek to remove that obstacle so as to lay a firmer foundation it may not come naturally at first. But think about it and it might. I don't give Samael any more credit or title than he deserves.
If you like Aramaic Christians (like Tewahedo) or Assyrian Christians (like Church of the East) or especially Orthodox, we can use them as good ground of agreement too.
Many people don’t even know what Aramaic Peshitta is, and think the original NT was written in Greek, but scholars know better.
I have a nuanced synthesis on this scholarly problem too, but it's usually not necessary for me to object to Peshitta primacy because it doesn't result in any useful distinctions.
The language Jesus spoke didn't have a framework for eternal punishment.
My joke is I've been through hell very thoroughly and now I can go in and out anytime I please. Yes, Jesus spoke often of Gehenna, and, yes, sheol-hades is very different from Norse nastrond-hell. I have a nuanced synthesis there too, where the most important point is that it's relatively useless to argue about eternal states since we basically have forever to learn about them.
Jesus wasn't claiming to be uniquely divine in a way that separated him from the rest of humanity. He was claiming to be fully human in a way that revealed what all humans could become.
Porque no los dos? I agree that Bar Enosh (my spelling) is paradigmatic humanity as you say, but the nature of divinity in Jesus was in fact unique compared to the the nature of divinity in the rest of us, and so that calls for very exact technical language. I have my last month's study on Bar Enosh sitting around here with the OT and Apocryphal references that indicate a number of supernatural scopes to it, all of which are compatible with fully realized human nature.
So the upshot is that I agree there are forces in traditional Christianity that suppress people and potential via misunderstandings such as Gehenna and Bar Enosh. What I mean above is that also in traditional Christianity are the seeds that can reawaken these original understandings anytime they are watered, and (considering what human potential means) the church potential is unspeakably vast.
So I appreciate your clarifying things so that I can see our positions in a map where we aren't too far apart. That leaves me without an immediate followup question. If you're willing to suffer me in my interpretation of the true meaning of "Yahweh", or if you're willing to disabuse me of some errors I may make about it, please feel free. I certainly encourage you to post or comment more about the unblurred entities that are doing the manipulation all along; that's what this forum is for, and I've dropped links to other forums where similar thoughts are welcome.
So you begin by saying Yaldabaoth = Demiurge = Yahweh = OT God = Jewish God = Self-Existent = Eternal = Mosaic = Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. I'll agree.
Then you say none of these equal the Monad. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
You say Samael = an archangel = Accuser = Adversary = Seducer = Destroyer = Saklas = Masonic God = Illusion Programmer = Saturn. I'll agree.
Then you say that some of these equal some of the names of Yahweh. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
We agree on there being two concepts, Monad and Samael. You want to put the Yahweh concept onto Samael, I want to put it onto Monad. It's not sufficient for us each to argue that our own desire is self-evidently better. We'd need some common basis for realizing the truth of the things we are talking about. If Monad and Samael exist, it's a matter of truth or falsity whether any Yahweh title does or doesn't apply to either. If we were to agree on nuanced synthesis, neither of us would be dogmatic about putting the Yahweh concept any particular place. But if you sound dogmatic about it not belonging with the Monad you create a binary proposition that can be discussed under agreed rules on pursuing truth. Are you willing to pursue the truth of the matter wherever it leads?
Good! That allows bridge-building.
This is very close to "apophatic theology", which I define as talking about Being via what it is not. There's a second way of talking about Being ("cataphatic"), namely how it reconciles spectra of things that are. In the first way, the Monad isn't even a monad or a plurality because those are words for emanated things: it is both undivided and unmixed. It's not separate from us, and it's not joined to us. It's not expecting, and it's not failing either. It's not judging and it's not judged. It's not awareness and it's not lethe. In the second way of talking, we do use words like this recognizing that they describe aspects that are transcended and harmonized, and that form of speech is common and valid as well.
What bothers churchmen is that speaking of the attribute of impersonality carries a risk that we demote the attribute of personality. Ultimately this need not be done, but so many have created an impersonal god in their own imaginations and gone far astray in everyone else's judgment that there is a warning against it. Francis Schaeffer took the bull by the horns by writing Beyond Personality to awaken Christians to this reality; he might interest you!
Good human institutions only survive because they humbly refuse to speak for God. "Nature" speaks for itself, though we call it impersonal, and all revelation works the same way. Yet people who can't get the experience of monism right ("general revelation") need not to be too assertive when describing an experience of "special revelation".
I would say instead that "Creator" and "Yahweh" and "Reality" and "Fundament" and "Distance" are all shadows that only approximate; no merely human word is final. Our always striving to know reality better allows our words to be sufficient and actionable without being exhaustive. But what's happened (and it started with Jews inventing "Ein Sof" or "Infinity" IMHO) is that people who find one label insufficient for one purpose then put their trust in ... another label. I kept seeking the root of it all and realized I could never apprehend the root and remain myself. I then started using all the words as shadows of various states of being, and I recognized that they fit together into many different isomorphic structures. In the structure you posit above, "Reality" is Fundamental and "Yahweh" and "Creator" are Distant, which might be true in many applications, but the words could be rearranged several ways to yield many truths in other applications, and all the arrangements have nuanced meaning and value without contradiction.
That is indeed Near East divine-council theory, but it seems like it cuts against the idea that we never use the word "God" for the "Top". Whatever is revealed to us is mediated by our incompleteness and so in one sense we can never know what is beyond and in another sense we can know "God" or any "Thing" with sufficient, actionable substance.
I don't see a contradiction, they both sound like John 1:1-3.
No, in the fundamentals I don't. By calling it Monad and Silence and Space you're applying labels that simply put it at a different pole of the spectrum of being than calling it God and Speaker and Creator. Genesis uses a lot of personal language (because personality came from somewhere and isn't a power that creatures have over the Monad), but it doesn't lead to contradiction, but paradox (i.e. something resolvable via nuance). For instance after the general introduction we are told that the Spirit broods (silently) before a Word is said (audibly). But the word for brooding and the word for speaking both come down to the same phenomenon, vibration in waves, expressed differently. So silence and speech are set by the text as a paradox, and we now have a scientific ("gnostic") way of resolving the paradox with nuance.
Okay, the experience is real, and the imaginative extrapolation is useful to a point, but not to all points. To say the Monad "is" awareness without thoughts is merely to apply a perceived experience to the whole of reality, which falls short because the map is never the territory.
Yeah, I discovered that if there are boundaries they are indiscernible.
Use of paradox then, which is not monad but dyad and synthesis.
Well, when we look at history there's an origin to spacetime, but there are still lots of views about that (including denying it).
Here the paradox is that if we were to teach how the Monad is served we would be just another religion. So in one sense the Monad cannot be served, but in another sense you truly imply we do serve the Monad somewhere between the Me (experience) and the Myself (reflection). That is because we could say the Monad "is" the Me and "is" the Myself and "is" the service. That gets us back to all relative words having a natural pattern of active, inactive, action (lover, beloved, love). That pattern is, however, isomorphic with the pattern of All being One. So, having beheld the Monad, and having beheld the Other (reflection) that is Self that have a relationship (reflective surface), we rejoice in the beholding, but when we come back to speaking English to our fellow man we end up using words that are like those already spoken, sometimes better and often worse. And all those words have sufficiency and substantiality without needing perfection or exhaustiveness. And that's what we build bridges on.
Bridge-building is finding agreements between people of diverse experiences.
Your take on me is accurate enough in so many words, but part of the bridge-building involves recognizing that what I mean by Yahweh is not what you've come to believe Yahweh is. If there's a Monad, and also a part-time architect named Samael, I think the title or name Yahweh better describes the Monad. You seem to have become so familiar with assuming that Samael is automatically Yahweh that when I seek to remove that obstacle so as to lay a firmer foundation it may not come naturally at first. But think about it and it might. I don't give Samael any more credit or title than he deserves.
If you like Aramaic Christians (like Tewahedo) or Assyrian Christians (like Church of the East) or especially Orthodox, we can use them as good ground of agreement too.
I have a nuanced synthesis on this scholarly problem too, but it's usually not necessary for me to object to Peshitta primacy because it doesn't result in any useful distinctions.
My joke is I've been through hell very thoroughly and now I can go in and out anytime I please. Yes, Jesus spoke often of Gehenna, and, yes, sheol-hades is very different from Norse nastrond-hell. I have a nuanced synthesis there too, where the most important point is that it's relatively useless to argue about eternal states since we basically have forever to learn about them.
Porque no los dos? I agree that Bar Enosh (my spelling) is paradigmatic humanity as you say, but the nature of divinity in Jesus was in fact unique compared to the the nature of divinity in the rest of us, and so that calls for very exact technical language. I have my last month's study on Bar Enosh sitting around here with the OT and Apocryphal references that indicate a number of supernatural scopes to it, all of which are compatible with fully realized human nature.
So the upshot is that I agree there are forces in traditional Christianity that suppress people and potential via misunderstandings such as Gehenna and Bar Enosh. What I mean above is that also in traditional Christianity are the seeds that can reawaken these original understandings anytime they are watered, and (considering what human potential means) the church potential is unspeakably vast.
So I appreciate your clarifying things so that I can see our positions in a map where we aren't too far apart. That leaves me without an immediate followup question. If you're willing to suffer me in my interpretation of the true meaning of "Yahweh", or if you're willing to disabuse me of some errors I may make about it, please feel free. I certainly encourage you to post or comment more about the unblurred entities that are doing the manipulation all along; that's what this forum is for, and I've dropped links to other forums where similar thoughts are welcome.
So you begin by saying Yaldabaoth = Demiurge = Yahweh = OT God = Jewish God = Self-Existent = Eternal = Mosaic = Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. I'll agree.
Then you say none of these equal the Monad. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
You say Samael = an archangel = Accuser = Adversary = Seducer = Destroyer = Saklas = Masonic God = Illusion Programmer = Saturn. I'll agree.
Then you say that some of these equal some of the names of Yahweh. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
We agree on there being two concepts, Monad and Samael. You want to put the Yahweh concept onto Samael, I want to put it onto Monad. It's not sufficient for us each to argue that our own desire is self-evidently better. We'd need some common basis for realizing the truth of the things we are talking about. If Monad and Samael exist, it's a matter of truth or falsity whether any Yahweh title does or doesn't apply to either. If we were to agree on nuanced synthesis, neither of us would be dogmatic about putting the Yahweh concept any particular place. But if you sound dogmatic about it not belonging with the Monad you create a binary proposition that can be discussed under agreed rules on pursuing truth. Are you willing to pursue the truth of the matter wherever it leads?