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Does God have an Agenda? (nondualism)

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https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2017/05/...genda.html

Ben Iscatus (guest essayist) --> EXCERPTS: . . . Idealism takes many forms, but in what follows, I am assuming that monistic Idealism [[color=#660000]called nondualism in the East[/url]] is true. This means that God (or Consciousness) is all there is. What we call 'matter' is just how ideas or thoughts in God's mind appear and register to the senses of avatars (humans and animals) in God's dream of Planet Earth. I will use the terms "God" and "Consciousness" interchangeably here. (Conventionally, I refer to God as "He", but the "She" and "It" pronouns are implied). The essay is an informal and sometimes avant-garde exploration of some of the issues, and I hope you find it entertaining.

OK, that's the premise. So what is God dreaming and why?

First, there doesn't actually have to be a "why." God could be dreaming the World (the Universe) just because that's what He naturally does. No reason is intrinsically necessary. This is the view that Ancient Chinese philosophy takes. However, if human beings are delimited aspects or sub-personalities of God, then we might be expected to share some of God's mental attributes. Curiosity about our origin may therefore be something that derives from God Himself.

Now, it may be that only humans have this need to search for a "why" because (to borrow Bernardo's analogy), being little whirlpools cut off from the sight of the great river makes us self-reflective (I can't see the river or feel its flow, so how on Earth did I get here and why do I exist?). In this analogy, animals would be swirls and eddies rather than full whirlpools, not cut off from the natural flow of the world, and God, being the whole river itself, would instinctively know who and what He was. Nevertheless, He might like to see how He appears from multiple different, limited perspectives, which is why he creates or permits the human whirlpools...

In spite of this possibility, if you can accept the idea that a Creator God may not be utterly ineffable and may indeed have reasons that humans might understand for His thinking and dreaming, then we can speculate what these reasons might be.

The most obvious religious idea about what God is to us in the West, is the Christian one of 'Love' [...] Right across Nature, parents of many animals show care and nurture of their offspring, particularly mammals. [...] Going against this pragmatic explanation are (ahem, celibate!) mystics who say that Heaven is indeed a realm of blissful Love.

[...] "Loosh" is a term first coined by Out-of-Body researcher Bob Monroe. You get the idea; we're being duped, love-drugged and cunningly harvested, our life-energies are being fed upon by higher-dimensional beings.

This recalls the old Gnostic notion of a false god in charge of Creation, a Demiurge. It's not a silly idea. Look at life as we know it on Earth [...] There's a lot of killing as well as loving going on in this Dream/Nightmare we're in. [...] Why did animals [in contrast to plants] have to evolve and enter the dream? Why teeth, why claws, why stings?

[...] The answer, presumably, is that Love is not enough [...] Evolutionary activity can be construed as Consciousness moving into species and phenotypes in order to explore its own qualities and characteristics. Clear evolutionary strategies apart from Love, Sex and Fear include Dominance, Cunning, Concealment and Co-operation. We humans have evolved a greater self-awareness and cultural intelligence because we are not simply immersed in the natural flow of life—we moved out of our natural habitat [...]

All our complex human behaviours must be hard on God the Dreamer. It seems reasonable to suppose that such intense dreaming cannot be sustained for very long. The current dream-image of a world under strain does suggest that this is so.

But, going back to the idea of an evil Demiurge, and looking at the history of the Universe as a whole rather than just our planet Earth [...] one can speculate about a very different, alternative agenda. This Big Picture 'shadow agenda' might be that the Original God, from whom the Demiurge sprang, actually finds manifest life complete anathema. The true Unmanifest God may not have wished to dream at all; He may only have wanted to find a way to be Unconscious.

In this scenario, The Big Bang would be seen not as an act of Creation, but as an act of Destruction—an exploding suicide bomb—God's attempt to self-destruct, emerging from Infinity and Eternity into the finite structures of space and time. It's been suggested that the Universe as a whole looks rather like a brain. So the Universe expanding out into the Big Rip can be seen as an image of its synapses stretching and its neurons flying apart, dissipating until there is no longer a Mind left to speak of. Perhaps the True God cannot bear His own lonely, ever-wakeful Consciousness, so is seeking to die to Himself.

Self-extinction or achievement of "Notself" has a perfectly respectable Buddhist tradition in the context of dissolving the human ego—a will to nihilism, Nirvana, which in one translation means "blown out": let's interpret that expression as blowing outwards like the Big Bang, as well as like a candle flame being snuffed out.

[...] It may even be that humanity, and the Demiurge which sustains us even as it uses us, really represent the pro-Life Resistance! In which case, Nietzsche would be wrong—God is not dead, at least not yet. The laws of thermodynamics are against us, but let's hope we're not predestined to snuff ourselves out or blow ourselves up...

MORE: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2017/05/...genda.html

- - - Media Bias / Fact Check - - -

Benardo Kastrup website: NO EVALUATION IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE AT MEDIA BIAS / FACT CHECK

Factual Reporting: NO RATING IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE AT MEDIA BIAS / FACT CHECK

ALT INFO SOURCE (biographical): Bernardo Kastrup has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s foremost research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the “Casimir Effect” of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has authored many scientific papers and four philosophy books: Rationalist Spirituality, Dreamed up Reality, Meaning in Absurdity, and Why Materialism Is Baloney. This latter book is a grand synthesis of his metaphysical views. Bernardo has also been an entrepreneur and founder of two high-tech businesses. Today, he holds a managerial position in the high-tech industry. In parallel, he maintains a philosophy blog, an audio/video podcast, and continues to develop his ideas about the nature of reality. Bernardo has lived and worked in four different countries across continents. He currently resides in the Netherlands.

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