Comments interleaved: **
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Marek Reavis" > <reavismarek@> wrote: > <snip> > > Kashmiri Shaivism (to the degree I'm familiar with it) seems > > to have the best take on assuming that God is the One doing > > all the doing and enjoying and the sooner we get on that train > > the more we participate in the divine experience. (Isn't this > > what Edg was saying?) > > If God is the One doing all the doing and enjoying, > what does "get on that train" mean, exactly? Aren't > we already *on* it, willy-nilly? > "Get on the train" means experiencing the process of having your attention drawn to itself. And, yes, we are *on* it, but have not yet *realized* it. > Or to put it another way, whatever "get on that train" > means, if God is the One doing all the doing, isn't > it God who determines whether we get on the train or > not? > I think the problem here is the huge disparity of understood status between the concept of an individual and the concept of God. If you think about whatever "Life" is (or the "Lifeforce principle") as the underlying "God" principle, it doesn't seem to be much of a leap to understand that this life is not "my" life but Life living *me*; Life expressing itself as me and my life. A piece of fruit on the tree starts out green or unripe and in its time it ripens and falls. The whole sequence is the "life" of the fruit; realization (to me) is the moment when this particular fruit understands its own ripeness (the expression of Life as ripe, full, perfected [but only in a sense]) and suddenly and irrevocably "falls". We experience our growth and enlightenment naturally and our own time. There is a sequence of growth that we may understand and feel as a process of cause and effect, but it may just be the ripening of wisdom, insight and realization of what It is that we are (and have always been) and expression of. > If it's up to us to get on the train, that means we > have individual free will, which contradicts the > notion that God is doing all the doing. The *feeling* we have and identify as free will may just be the unfolding of our life that really doesn't require individual attention. We talk about "our" bodies but we are almost entirely not in control of them, except in a very provisional and limited way; think digestion, breathing, circulation, immune responses, etc. All these automatic functions that we have mostly no influence on. > > I think this is what throws people like Barry so > badly off: they don't take the idea that God does it > all far enough, and they end up assuming what they're > arguing. > > From my perspective, it seems that the premise that > God is doing all the doing has absolutely *zero* > implications for behavior, including how one thinks. > It's just a theoretical metaphysical point that's fun > to play with. (And if it happens to be true, it's God > who's having fun playing with it.) > Yes, agreed. We all just do what we do, are drawn to what interests us and retreat from what doesn't. Our life trajectories seem to be mostly the aggregate results of random decisions, each individual decision not fundamentally different than "this tastes good" and "that doesn't taste good". Over time the distribution of all these individual decisions tend to create larger waves of predispositions that also interact with each other, moire-like patterns that define us as Marek or Judy or Barry or whomever. Marek
