I've come up with a new (well, new for my own sake) philosophical theory that makes pretty much sense to me. Does anyone agree with me on this one? There is only one consciousness in the universe, or rather, the multiverse, let's call it God, though the soul is in a way split so that each creature it inhabits (God is actually in everything, because it's energy, intelligent energy, and energy can turn into matter, according to Einstein) thinks it's a separate being.

That means that we are all the same person, and if -you- were born in the body of a sadistic serial killer, you would end up doing exactly the same things as he did. It's like, in the beginning, God was alone, and nothing existed, so he was bored and created a world, or rather a play, and plays all the roles himself, most of them are ignorant of this in this form, that's why he also made religions, to lead people away from the truth. Yes, everything is pre-determined, because God in it's purest form is infinately intelligent, and knowing how he would react in every given situation, in any given "role", he chose how everything would manifest at the moment he created the universe, since everything is a cause of another event. This means that we have free will, but everything is predetermined as well.

Some questions though... Why make people do evil stuff, when you know you have to experience it yourself? I mean, without -any- suffering, we wouldn't know relief and the joy of the positive things, but things as burning thousands of witches alive, it doesn't make any sense, to me at this moment.

And does this mean that everything we imagine is real, in other universes, or dimensions, since we are God, the Creator? I've also heard of a chaos theory, saying that everything does actually exist, in an infinite number of dimensions... There is a universe -exactly- like this except for perhaps a minor detail, like one more bird. This would explain this. This would also make the worlds of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Magic the Gathering and Star Wars real.

Also, I don't know what happens after death, do we become "one with all" at once, or do our individual soul (which is actually, again, just a manifestation of the One Soul) wait for another body to host? What about ghosts? And nature spirits? Any thoughts? Very fascinating stuff this...

Congratulations on discovering Hinduism, buddy.

Is it? I didn't know hinduism was like that, I haven't exactly studied it that much either, but I'll definately look more into it then, perhaps they can answer my questions as well, like afterlife, extreme suffering and other dimensions...

SatanIsMyStewardess - you are going to surpass Mors_Gloria in posts!

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OP:

But basically....no - it would be nice if that were the case.
But shit dont fly like that. I see no greater consciousness.
Supernatural anything? Where's the proof! We are DNA, nothing more.

Theosophy delves into this briefly, but the highest consciousness can be obtained through rigorous training and the embracing of our divine nature. It's an interesting thought, and if you accept thought as proof, easy to defend. However, then would that make all actions around you natural, or since we are the godhead, a good action?

This is something I thought about a long time ago; and my conclusion was that it was irrelevant. It is possible; but only in the sense that it is possible that God exists. There is absolutely no way to prove it, and it is entirely irrelevant whether it is true or not.

I dont see why people cant understand why God would kill innocent people. People who leave Christianity because of this havent read the bible. God has much greater understanding than us and say that your mother dies. She was a really good person who loved God. God could have let her die for several reasons. 1.If this experience caused you to question your faith, guess what, thats what God wanted you to do. It was a test because if your mother dying can make you question your faith than you probably werent very strong or sure about your religion. The bible says that God will test you. 2. It happened for another persons trial or it may be something beyond a humans understanding. 3. I guess you could call history a play of sorts because God is using events to see how it all turns out.

4. Car's hurt.

That is what Christians tend to do: make up stories or reasonings to explain tings they can't explain neither scientifically nor logically.
This whole "God has a higher plan" is complete bullshit, it's just a way to try to explain the discrepancies and contradictions between the Bible and the real world.

Yep, it's the classic God Moves In Mysterious Ways argument, one of many all-purpose Christian copouts.

Indeed, an omnipotent god has to kill your mom in order to test your faith.

wat

Really there isn't anything to prove our existence and to find it's true meaning. That's why I reject religion because we as humans have nothing to go on, nothing to find the truth. It's simply absurd to truly believe in anything. For all we know your theory could be true but our minds can never grasp such things.

I've only been able to conclude that I exist. That is the only truth I know of. But hey everyone can be wrong.

Hinduism's three chief gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva represent the cyclical actions of creation, preservation, and destruction, respectively. So then the combinations of these gods into the trimurti, which is Brahman: the all-encompassing omniscient macrocosm.

Buddhism approaches the same belief in evasive terms. However, there is this inexplicable oneness that occurs. In the end there can be nothing truly said about it, for any attribute it has, it has its opposite.

The same can almost be said in Taoism, which I cannot say much of, but I've perused over. A stunning example is the explanation of the Kabbalic belief of tzimtzum: Ayin (Nothingness), the ultimate attribute of the Ain Soph Aur, or "The Endless Light", contains everything and nothing. This macrocosmic totality of awareness in some sort of sentience, withdraws most of itself from the universe, in order to "create" a lesser representation of itself, so that man might realize that everything that is matter and "spirit" are the same Endless Light.

Ironically, your signature is similar to a Sufi story.

Cool

I used to think something similar when I took up Advaita, but not anymore.

Anyway - consciousness is entirely related to memory. You're conscious when you use functions of memory to distinguish between what you think is your 'identity' and what exists 'outside'. The thought-process which is linking together of thoughts is where you're constantly reminding yourself of how you perceive your identity such as your beliefs, your goals etc. Thus, everything you perceive goes through this huge filter that is your 'identity' - but this identity is cooked up, fictional - and in actuality just a figment of your imagination.

So in that way - there is actually no 'I', 'that' and 'you', we're no different from our surroundings, but memory causes us to make the distinction through the afforementioned process. We're composed of the same thing, and it ain't consciousness. Consciousness is purely memory-based - which is why we find that conscious beings always have higher capacities in relation to memory. By your theory though, a rock is conscious of itself as well - in which case, good luck with tests to calibrate your sanity.

Not at all - but it is fun to play with to it's many logical conclusions.



Not exactly - that is like saying all of your skin cells are the same cell or all of the neurons in your brain are the same neuron.



So you are predetermined to question your own existence? What kind of creator would create a multiplicity of itself only to program each aspect to doubt it's creation? Basically, if the creator doubts itself it is not very all-powerful is it. The same goes for the Miracle Paradox - if everything is predestined but the creator steps in and alters an event (a miracle) than that means the creator is not perfect, as perfection has no need to be altered...



Because we learn how to feel before we learn how to think, and therefore learn to appease our primal desires before we learn to logically limit our animal instinct -- and yes, everything you imagine is real to you.



Ever had a night of dreamless sleep? Serious. Ever set your alarm and fall asleep right as you hit the pillow only to have the alarm sound off a split second later? Where did the time go? Time is a man made contruct and is therefore only real in our conscious mind. So whether it's 45 minutes, 3 hours or all day - the same 'split second' passes. When you die, you enter that "split second" where time, read: consciousness ceases to be. Just like before you were born.

You talk about cause and effect. Death is the final cause , so there is no conscious realization of the cause and as a result no effect.

You are your thoughts and your ability to articulate them.

No it isn't.

It is man made. Its just day and night that are set by nature. Its human who decided how long seconds, minutes etc were.

That's just the human quantification of time. Time itself is not man-made.

There is no time without an observor. All we have is Entropy - which is easily defined as "The notable passage of what we call time."

The time still exists, we just would not have observed it. Entropy is directly related to time, further testament of its existence.

Fair enough, rexxz. It boils down to a semantic quibble at this point - hammering out the meaning of time will not invalidate my response to the OP.

Not it's not.. But that's still a good analogy since we are all parts of one big consciousness if I'm right.



Why wouldn't a creator want the people to question him? That's no reason why this can't be correct. You might as well question what the meaning of our whole existence is, why there are elephants in the world. It's not up to us to figure out. And in my opinion, miracles is a subjective word, there are actually no miracles, just like electricity was labeled supernatural some hundreds years ago, it's now accepted as natural.



I think you are misunderstanding the whole purpose of the thread...



Dreamless sleep? Like a coma? No, never. If you fall asleep and it feels like only a brief moment has passed and you wake up hours earlier, there's something weird with you, because that's very unusual. Anyway, how do you know you weren't thinking or sensing anything in those hours? You just might have, but then simply forgot it when you awake. Or the time itself simply goes a lot faster, just like time for a fly most likely goes much slower than it does for us.

No. People do not generally remember their dreams unless they wake in the middle of it, or perhaps if they make subconscious associations while awake. Everyone dreams during the REM phase of sleep, and without REM, one will eventually become insane.

Stormalv, there no such thing as soul. There is no absolute difference between good and evil. The actions of a man are a combination of his social environement and genetical inheritance. No point in this thread, hinduism and all the religions based on the idea of soul are a big sack of shit.

That's your belief. If you think you are inherit the knowledge of everything in the universe, fine for me, but don't expect everyone to believe you.

I'm not religious or anything, but I've never had a problem with reconcilling the concept of an omnipotent benevolent god with horrible shit happening to nice people. As much as a cop-out as it is, 'the lord works in mysterious ways' is quite a logical argument if you're dealing with a deity of unimaginable power and intelligence.



I've had that "dreamless sleep" thing happen a couple of times before. It's fucking weird. No awareness of time having gone by whatsoever.

That's just another massive assumption. Religion seems to be both based on and explained by assumptions, not logic.

If religion makes someone's life better, then I won't criticize their devotion by any means, but using logic to explain religious beliefs is not going to work. Even if the reason humans have a tendency to believe in a religion, and it's a fairly logical one, the religion itself is often extremely illogical to begin with, and any logical explanations are usually later conjured up by religious leaders in order to avoid scepticism among believers, or made up on the spot in order to increase the religion's crediblity.

The only religions I truly respect are those which portray deities which are personifications of our own feelings and realities, not irrational creations of the human mind which function more like contagious parasites on society than anything else (Islam, Christianity, Judaism). I dare to hope that there's something deeper in our existence than our simple biological selves, which one day all end.

Your hopes don't change the fact, though. And our biological selves are far from simple; very complex, in fact.

Fact...neither view can be proven. And while I'm aware of the complexity of the human body, I was referring to the idea of simplicity in that it's just mortal biological matter, and anyone except an atheist knows there's more than just that.

You mean "materialist." And the burden of proof is on the claim that there is "something more." Neuroscience has pretty much rendered the idea of dualism obsolete. Evolution also provides a strong evience against that "something more."

Edit: Well, if you're a theist, there is hardly any point in arguing this.

"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imaginations of ourselves(...)" - Bill Hicks

Hicks' drug addled mind beat you too it.

And Hindu's as afore mentioned. It's just, Hicks is a hipper reference.

The concept is interesting to toy around with, the same as the concept of God, etc. Until you realize that some people actually believe it and you develop this bad taste in your mouth; loss of faith in humanity promptly follows.

All such thoughts are humanity's projection of itself as some kind of splendourous being of vast grandeur. It's a senselessly romanticized version of existence that helps some people live through this mire of random circumstance we've dubbed "life".

to OP, good thread. You've been also doing some additional researches latelly, yes? Don't bother with your s/c common spiritual vampires 'above & around' Stormalv. Of course, I have a lot of thoughts to share on such fascinating topics with anyone who's interested and open-minded enough. Hm, maybe this one for a starter; For example, I admire your bravery, namely, to calling yourself - GOD, the Creator.. seriously, no pun intended.
*[side note: I really have to learn to think in english, to improve my 'engrish' I mean.]

"good" and "evil" are human constructs. take animals. you dont see any good birds and evil birds.

You missed the point. But that is fine.

@weezalwarrior - Think about a Seagul swooping into a flock of pigeons to steal a half eaten burger. That seagul is a total prick, right

Humans are animals, thus animals can have concept of what "good" and "evil" are. However, if you were to say that the concepts of "good" and "evil" were superfluous, and expand on that a bit about shades of grey and so on, then you might be heading in the right direction

My dogs appears to have a basic concept of right and wrong and punishment - one of them used to poo in rooms we never go in, in order to avoid being caught. He obviously knew we got mad for pooing. He knew he would be scolded for pooing in the house.

Yeah, actually my cat just threw up in my room 10 minutes before I wrote this. He looked really ashamed afterwards and silently walked away while watching me with big eyes.

Please note that in Advaita, consciousness is defined as "that which percieves but is never percieved". Thus, the Advaitic definition of consciousness is radically different from the western one. As per Advaita, thoughts, emotions, memories, ego, identity are all illussions as they are percieved - hence, cannot be the perciever. Consciousness as per advaita is pure awareness and is a non agent that does not interact with anything.