Pure Brutality

[Leonardo17]

   As I explained in the tree example in my previous post, as humans half of our respiratory system is outside. Trees are producing the oxygen. They exhale what we inhale, they inhale what we exhale. And as I mentioned in the cookie box example, most people are not aware of this fact. Cookie boxes do not need a layer of plastic. I usually get them in my own container so that more plastic is not produced. But you do not need a plastic layered cardboard box to offer cookies to you customers. A paper bag or envelope would do just fine. But people don’t notice. All they see is cost. Plastic layered cardboard is very cheap. So who cares about micro-plastics right?
 
   Some people say this has to do with education. The spiritual approach does not agree with that. Yogis says that education is empowerment. So spiritual understanding has to come before formal education.
 
So what is spirituality?
 
You have heard the motto “All is one” at least a few time in your lives right? That’s what I perceive as true spirituality. If I can understand that I am one with all of life, it becomes easier to remind myself to remind the waiter to not bring me plastic straw even if I know that he/she will be tempted to bring it anyway.
 
İs that wishful thinking?
 
- The opposite is wishful thinking. If you take a look at the state of the Middles East with all the religious wars and all that, personally I don’t see how this can go on just as it is without any evolution or transformation. All these people butchering one another and for what basically?
 
/ So yes my ideas are a little crazy. But the opposite idea is crazier. Don’t you agree?

Why redefine existing words, that already have a meaning, to dress them in your own personal word salad? Spiritual is the dictionary:

adjective
1. relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.
2. relating to religion or religious belief.

If that's not what you mean by spiritual then why use the word? Though I grant you the primary dictionary definition seems more than a little circular. Plants evolved to absorb carbon dioxide because it was in abundance, it is that simple, and as always Occam's razor applies. 

As to spiritual, the actual definition, if you can't demonstrate anything approaching objective evidence a soul or spirit exists, then I have no sound or objective reason to accept claims they do. 

I have no idea what you mean by the assertion you are "one with all life", it seems to be wishy washy word salad again, that all living things are linked is explained simply and elegantly by evolution, and it has the benefit of being supported by overwhelming objective evidence, so why violate Occam's razor and add things we don't need, and that are not objectively evidenced?

Nor do I need any of that word salad to easily understand that microplastics are harmful to the environment, and our dependance on and use of them, ought to be curtailed.

---

 

  In some cases this very issue can be a spiritual experience on its own. Like a hunter who is pointing his gun to a deer, suddenly realizing that he and the deer is one and thus being unable to shoot.


   So yes spirituality is very real. And the etiological root of Religion is the Latin word re-ligare meaning to bind-back.
    Yet the experience is largely personal. So no one can “prove it” if you want. But it’s very real on a personal level. I am currently experiencing these personal changes and transformation and I see it as a better way than being a 70 / 80 year old teenager like some celebrities I will not mention.

---

 
Belaqua:

“The Christians add something which Aristotle would not agree with: they think that at death the form of the body can be transferred into a different body. (You'll recall that Dante describes this in detail in the Purgatorio.) This is not something that can be argued logically, as hylomorphism is. It is revealed theology, and therefore not provable. I don't have that faith, so I don't see how it's possible. But recently some Silicone Valley guys have started to suggest something similar: they think that your self can be uploaded to some other kind of machine so you won't have to die. I think this is silly.”

 
- That’s a whole different debate but we are here for the fun right?
 
Sadhguru says that AI will soon replace things like university teachers. The era of being smart by being born 1 or 2 decades before others and loading information to your brain may be over soon (and that was unthinkable even in the 90’s).
 
Today the porn industry is working on sex bots that are based on software’s like Chat-GPT. So Anna de Armas like Blade Runner kind of wives may start being commercialized in our lifetimes.
 
So this probably answers most of the philosophical debate.
 
- Yes, if that’s what you define as “The Soul”, machines have already started to replicate that.
 
Yet, “The Soul” to the spiritual or spiritually inclined religious person is different. First of all it is a question mark. Like a Socrates style “I don’t know” kind of question mark. And all the efforst of the spiritual person is an attempt to elucidate this unknown. And Mystics from all traditions will tell you that Yes, one can achieve that in his/her lifetime.
 

“As you know, the mystical tradition in Christianity holds that a spiritual change is a change in the way a person sees the world. This is a very old tradition, but was perhaps articulated most clearly by Jacob Boehme, who made it clear that in his view, heaven is not a separate realm but a way of perceiving the here and now. A perfected way of perceiving, freed from ego and mistaken customs and habits. Many Christians before and since have agreed with this. You'll recall that William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, describes this well. Likewise, mystics in the Vedic tradition and in Buddhism see spirituality as a way to think about our thoughts and interpretations of the world, and how these may be improved.”

 
-       Yes, That’s what I am trying to refer to
 

“As for the common religious view that everything is One, you'll find this is well supported in Neoplatonic philosophy, traditional Indian philosophy, and Buddhism. Although I prefer the Buddhist term -- instead of One they say 不二, which just means "not two." This, again, has to do with perception. We understand the world by dividing it up. This is a necessary method -- discriminating this from that is the only way to live practically. But it is a function of the mind. Again, the Chinese/Japanese view is good here, because the character 分 means both "divide" and "understand."”

 
-       I agree
 

“In practice, spiritual people have followed a number of different courses, some silly and some worthwhile. The goal, as I understand it, is always to adjust oneself to a more healthy, more connected view of the world. This involves suppression of the ego, which is extremely difficult, and that's why we see so many failures. And since modern liberalism, and especially modern American cowboy ethics, makes the ego extraordinarily important, we live in a time when spiritual efforts tend to do quite badly.”

 
- That’s a good point too. But it’s all over the world not just Cowboys. You may log on youtube and type in something like “Beirut in the 1960’s”. In fact I am going to add the link below. You may also type in things like “Damascus in the 1960’s” or “Teheran in the 1960’s” and other stuff like that.
 
Before the emergence and spread of Political Islam as an ideology (mostly in the 1960’s) the world was a more civilized place. See civility is a choice. So is other neurotic / narcissistic approaches that include both extreme forms of capitalism (like libertarianism for instance) and/or things like Political Islam and/or the socialist experience / Stalinism that maintained itself between 1917 and 1991.
 
I won’t go into the philosophical debates here. But true forms of spirituality across the world will approach all of these thing as one singular problem that is plaguing all of humanity. And I did mention Political Islam being nothing but an Ego-based doctrine that is unrelated to any type of true spirituality right?
 
So I am going to leave you with these images of Beirut in the 1960’s. Even in the 1990’ (when I visited the place) this was a tax free zone where you could get all kinds of good stuff for half the price back home.




 
So as I said civility is a choice. I want it to prevail over narrow-mindedness and barbary. Because that’s the main problem we seem to be facing in 2024

Ahriman:

 
- That’s another main issue. When you “get high” you are actually “getting low”. That’s something I know as a small scale wine enthusiast. It’s better to stay away from the wheel after you’ve had like two cups of strong wine. I would prefer it if you can trust me on that
 
/ “All is one” type of “getting high” is when you really get high. Like when you are aware that by changing your attitude on something, you can motivate the entire specie to do the same. Like our ancestors did not use any work and spoon in the middle ages. Someone (in Italy) invented it. Than we all started eating in a more hygienic fashion. But still, it probably took some small numbered people (like me) to start using these utensils in order for the rest of the population to start adopting these in the next decades or centuries.
 
   So No, I think I’m still going to remind people even if they find it annoying. The micro plastic issue is real. It’s in our bloodstream. So we simply need to be careful on that

[Deesse23]

According to Aristotle, the soul is the form of the body.

According to Aristotle, the Earth is the center of the universe.

[The Grand Nudger]

  In some cases this very issue can be a spiritual experience on its own. Like a hunter who is pointing his gun to a deer, suddenly realizing that he and the deer is one and thus being unable to shoot.

Google "buck fever" for the kind of experience your audience may be more familiar with.  Still, I like your idea of the hunters epiphany - and while I suspect that hunters experience more of the former than the latter both are real in any meaningful sense of the word.  As are any number of experiences, some of them deeply antithetical and logically incompatible with each other as truth statements binding upon reality, rather than the limited subset of the reality of experiences.

As it goes - "I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened".

Before the emergence and spread of Political Islam as an ideology (mostly in the 1960’s) the world was a more civilized place. See civility is a choice. So is other neurotic / narcissistic approaches that include both extreme forms of capitalism (like libertarianism for instance) and/or things like Political Islam and/or the socialist experience / Stalinism that maintained itself between 1917 and 1991.

There you go again.  Before the emergence and spread of political islam in the 6 or 7 hundreds ad the world was "a more peaceful place" too.  They're not doing islam wrong, you are - even if you're doing spirituality right, whatever you and deepak chopra think that is.  The thing that animates these movements...each and every one, explicitly, is the return to whatever passes for an islamic golden age in nutville.  Christianity is going through the same shit over here and has been over the same period.  Both groups are convinced that the trouble with people today ™ is their lack of true spirituality.  We are too materialistic today, and not open enough to a spiritual reality - unlike those people who lived in feudal systems or worse in the past - and that's chemical weapons grade irony, when you let it sink in.  People who uniformly believed that people were property (and often still do....) are supposed to be the exemplars of anti-materialist values in comparison.

Sure, though, islamic states are going through a period of regression at the moment, not because they've left their spiritual roots, but because there's a strong period of retrenchment going on rooted -in- those spiritual beliefs.

[Ahriman]

There is nothing "spiritual" about humans. We are probably the least "spiritual" species on the planet. And spirituality doesn't have any meaningful answers, all it has is platitudes. People mistakenly believe this platitude horse shit is some kind of profound revelation, well....No? There's nothing profound about any of it. It's literally just stupid privileged people selling things to stupid not-so-privilegd people. Oldest trick in the book, and very tiresome. I don't understand how humans have still not evolved beyond this stage. Fairy stories, that "trick" people into having a world view that is not at all consistent with reality. I'm not sure how people fall for this crap, but it needs to stop.

[The Grand Nudger]

Probably because there's no "beyond". Evolution isn't an orderly march to correction, and the thing/s that inform our nonsensical sense have/has practical value to us as a species.

This idea that all of the great religions have some sort of kernel of value that we might mine in troubled times is not more complicated, imo, than returning to a known source of water when our exploratory compulsions fail to bare quite literal fruit. The thing that gives us the ability to do the one comes with misfires like the other. We and many other species will return to water so long as it hasn't killed us yet, even if it had poisoned us from the first sip...which...imo...is what happened with theism in general and the spiritualist self help market in particular.

[Sheldon]

Why redefine existing words, that already have a meaning, to dress them in your own personal word salad? Spiritual is the dictionary:

adjective
1. relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.
2. relating to religion or religious belief.

If that's not what you mean by spiritual then why use the word? Though I grant you the primary dictionary definition seems more than a little circular. Plants evolved to absorb carbon dioxide because it was in abundance, it is that simple, and as always Occam's razor applies. 

As to spiritual, the actual definition, if you can't demonstrate anything approaching objective evidence a soul or spirit exists, then I have no sound or objective reason to accept claims they do. 

I have no idea what you mean by the assertion you are "one with all life", it seems to be wishy washy word salad again, that all living things are linked is explained simply and elegantly by evolution, and it has the benefit of being supported by overwhelming objective evidence, so why violate Occam's razor and add things we don't need, and that are not objectively evidenced?

Nor do I need any of that word salad to easily understand that microplastics are harmful to the environment, and our dependance on and use of them, ought to be curtailed.

---

 

  In some cases this very issue can be a spiritual experience on its own. Like a hunter who is pointing his gun to a deer, suddenly realizing that he and the deer is one and thus being unable to shoot.


   So yes spirituality is very real. And the etiological root of Religion is the Latin word re-ligare meaning to bind-back.
    Yet the experience is largely personal. So no one can “prove it” if you want. But it’s very real on a personal level. I am currently experiencing these personal changes and transformation and I see it as a better way than being a 70 / 80 year old teenager like some celebrities I will not mention.

---

 
Belaqua:

“The Christians add something which Aristotle would not agree with: they think that at death the form of the body can be transferred into a different body. (You'll recall that Dante describes this in detail in the Purgatorio.) This is not something that can be argued logically, as hylomorphism is. It is revealed theology, and therefore not provable. I don't have that faith, so I don't see how it's possible. But recently some Silicone Valley guys have started to suggest something similar: they think that your self can be uploaded to some other kind of machine so you won't have to die. I think this is silly.”

 
- That’s a whole different debate but we are here for the fun right?
 
Sadhguru says that AI will soon replace things like university teachers. The era of being smart by being born 1 or 2 decades before others and loading information to your brain may be over soon (and that was unthinkable even in the 90’s).
 
Today the porn industry is working on sex bots that are based on software’s like Chat-GPT. So Anna de Armas like Blade Runner kind of wives may start being commercialized in our lifetimes.
 
So this probably answers most of the philosophical debate.
 
- Yes, if that’s what you define as “The Soul”, machines have already started to replicate that.
 
Yet, “The Soul” to the spiritual or spiritually inclined religious person is different. First of all it is a question mark. Like a Socrates style “I don’t know” kind of question mark. And all the efforst of the spiritual person is an attempt to elucidate this unknown. And Mystics from all traditions will tell you that Yes, one can achieve that in his/her lifetime.
 

“As you know, the mystical tradition in Christianity holds that a spiritual change is a change in the way a person sees the world. This is a very old tradition, but was perhaps articulated most clearly by Jacob Boehme, who made it clear that in his view, heaven is not a separate realm but a way of perceiving the here and now. A perfected way of perceiving, freed from ego and mistaken customs and habits. Many Christians before and since have agreed with this. You'll recall that William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, describes this well. Likewise, mystics in the Vedic tradition and in Buddhism see spirituality as a way to think about our thoughts and interpretations of the world, and how these may be improved.”

 
-       Yes, That’s what I am trying to refer to
 

“As for the common religious view that everything is One, you'll find this is well supported in Neoplatonic philosophy, traditional Indian philosophy, and Buddhism. Although I prefer the Buddhist term -- instead of One they say 不二, which just means "not two." This, again, has to do with perception. We understand the world by dividing it up. This is a necessary method -- discriminating this from that is the only way to live practically. But it is a function of the mind. Again, the Chinese/Japanese view is good here, because the character 分 means both "divide" and "understand."”

 
-       I agree
 

“In practice, spiritual people have followed a number of different courses, some silly and some worthwhile. The goal, as I understand it, is always to adjust oneself to a more healthy, more connected view of the world. This involves suppression of the ego, which is extremely difficult, and that's why we see so many failures. And since modern liberalism, and especially modern American cowboy ethics, makes the ego extraordinarily important, we live in a time when spiritual efforts tend to do quite badly.”

 
- That’s a good point too. But it’s all over the world not just Cowboys. You may log on youtube and type in something like “Beirut in the 1960’s”. In fact I am going to add the link below. You may also type in things like “Damascus in the 1960’s” or “Teheran in the 1960’s” and other stuff like that.
 
Before the emergence and spread of Political Islam as an ideology (mostly in the 1960’s) the world was a more civilized place. See civility is a choice. So is other neurotic / narcissistic approaches that include both extreme forms of capitalism (like libertarianism for instance) and/or things like Political Islam and/or the socialist experience / Stalinism that maintained itself between 1917 and 1991.
 
I won’t go into the philosophical debates here. But true forms of spirituality across the world will approach all of these thing as one singular problem that is plaguing all of humanity. And I did mention Political Islam being nothing but an Ego-based doctrine that is unrelated to any type of true spirituality right?
 
So I am going to leave you with these images of Beirut in the 1960’s. Even in the 1990’ (when I visited the place) this was a tax free zone where you could get all kinds of good stuff for half the price back home.




 
So as I said civility is a choice. I want it to prevail over narrow-mindedness and barbary. Because that’s the main problem we seem to be facing in 2024

Ahriman:

 
- That’s another main issue. When you “get high” you are actually “getting low”. That’s something I know as a small scale wine enthusiast. It’s better to stay away from the wheel after you’ve had like two cups of strong wine. I would prefer it if you can trust me on that
 
/ “All is one” type of “getting high” is when you really get high. Like when you are aware that by changing your attitude on something, you can motivate the entire specie to do the same. Like our ancestors did not use any work and spoon in the middle ages. Someone (in Italy) invented it. Than we all started eating in a more hygienic fashion. But still, it probably took some small numbered people (like me) to start using these utensils in order for the rest of the population to start adopting these in the next decades or centuries.
 
   So No, I think I’m still going to remind people even if they find it annoying. The micro plastic issue is real. It’s in our bloodstream. So we simply need to be careful on that

So where are we on any objective evidence that a soul or anything spiritual exists, or are even possible?

[Belacqua]

Perhaps you're thinking that a soul is some kind of material substance? Like a wispy thing that can fly out of the body. 

Perhaps you should learn what a straw man fallacy is?

Now does anything in that post directly address what I actually said? Or have you interjected again, with a straw man, and a long post that doesn't actually address my point?

A straw man fallacy is when you intentionally misrepresent your opponent's position in order to defeat it in argument more easily. 

If I put a question mark at the end of a sentence, that's a question. I'm asking if that's your view of what a soul is. You didn't answer my question. 

I have described how Christians traditionally view what a soul is.

[Ahriman]

Does having a soul even matter? How does having a soul make humans significantly different than other living things?

[The Grand Nudger]

Moot point, it seems, since our spirit advocate has told us he thinks that a soul is exactly that. A wispy thing that can fly out of the body....and "more", too.

[Belacqua]

So where are we on any objective evidence that a soul or anything spiritual exists, or are even possible?

The soul is the form of the body (in the traditional Christian view) and every material object has a form. The objective evidence for the soul is that every material object has a form. 

I said this before but you ignored it. 

As I said before, the spiritual consists of the thoughts and perceptions of the perceiver. What kind of objective evidence can we have that the thoughts and perceptions of the perceiver have changed? 

I said these things before but you ignored them and haven't responded.