Define "being"

@Fido,

Fido, I see all matter as Mind in motion. I (God) center that motion, I AM not that motion. All the material world is created in MY image. Those things I don't like are reflected back to me, for they are what I have created while separate from God. To heal that separation - I must give no more thought to what is reflected back to me, effect and motion are the same thing. An image is the opposite of a reflection. So much of my awakening has come from the study of Walter and Lao Russell's philosophy.

@Richardgrant,

Richardgrant wrote:

Fido, I see all matter as Mind in motion. I (God) center that motion, I AM not that motion. All the material world is created in MY image. Those things I don't like are reflected back to me, for they are what I have created while separate from God. To heal that separation - I must give no more thought to what is reflected back to me, effect and motion are the same thing. An image is the opposite of a reflection. So much of my awakening has come from the study of Walter and Lao Russell's philosophy.

I don't know how you can create the notion of God as a cause no matter how many effects you see..We are used to living in a cause and effect world, but knowing a false cause is not better than admitting you do not know the cause, and in my book it is far worse because people do not look past the first workable explanation, and it is ignorance and it is the tyranny mankind must forever overthrow.

The Greeks looked at the heavens and called it the firmament, the result of power... What was obvious to them is obvious to us, that a great force of power is at work, but does that mean there is mind at work as well... WE might as well be part of some cosmic accident as some choice, so I think what matters not does not matter little, and that socially, we can act as God and so deserve praise, honors, love, and forgiveness even if with death these become nothing- and just by caring for each other as we would ourselves seek caring...All we know we have is each other...Let us treasure and enjoy life...

@Fido,

Fido wrote:

. . . how you can create the notion of God as a cause ...

Easy enough. Those things that happen by something other than mechanical cause are by divine cause.

@Fairbanks,

Fairbanks wrote:

Easy enough. Those things that happen by something other than mechanical cause are by divine cause.

Got to get out my mechanics book, which is a branch of physics; so even if there is a physical explanation that is not mechanical, can I take your words as true???

@Richardgrant,

The translation of Greek esti :bigsmile:.

But seriously, I would say that "being" is, by and large, what underlies our ordinary experience. Being could be defined by a soul (Hindu atman) or it could not (Buddhist anatman). It could be our ordinary experiences define what is real, as per Semitic tradition, or it could be the truth underlying experiential normality, as per Manichean or Indian thought.

Personally, at this point, I'm not sure "being" is even definable.

@Fido,

Fido wrote:

Got to get out my mechanics book, . . . ???

In the greater meaning of 'mechanical' include everything that physics and chemistry predicts with its powerful math. Nowhere in physics or math is either the civil state, this post, or the Internet predicted. Nor even why a bee would choose a particular flower to light upon.

@Fido,

Fido wrote:

. . . words as true???

The difference between mechanical and divine is temporal. Not in the common sense that time can run forwards or backwards as appears permitted by many fomulas in physics, but in the sense that something happens temporally if it is predictable and non-temporally if it is organic, which idea appears in one small previously unnoticed paragraph in one thick philosophy book in the dangerously huge stack of philosophy books by my study desk. Those who speed-read philosophy would have missed it and I might never find it again.

@hammersklavier,

hammersklavier wrote:

The translation of Greek esti :bigsmile:.

But seriously, I would say that "being" is, by and large, what underlies our ordinary experience. Being could be defined by a soul (Hindu atman) or it could not (Buddhist anatman). It could be our ordinary experiences define what is real, as per Semitic tradition, or it could be the truth underlying experiential normality, as per Manichean or Indian thought.

Personally, at this point, I'm not sure "being" is even definable.

Exactly so... Being is an infinte, as is God, or existence... Our part in being is life, and while we experience life as a spiritual quality it seems to be, however it is defined, as based entirely upon physical reality, food, fresh air, fresh water, and is passed from persons to a person like a kiss... The ability to confuse the issue with imagining is infinte too; but if my spiritual fulfillment, and the good of my soul means that you stuggle with the necessities of life, then my spiritual being appears as so much bunk... We should try to put life first, the basic needs of each life, even the spiritual needs of liberty and equality before reaching for the eternal... So long as humanity exists, each of us will be eternal; so then ask how we can each have our lives without giving too much of our lives for them, or robbing too much from future humanity to have an excess today...Where is the spiritual value in blowing through resources today that tomorrow people will be fighting over and dieing for??? We must recognize that our forms today do not have the sight that primitive forms gave to primitives... They had to live in their world or find a new one.... We have run out of worlds we can destroy...

@Fairbanks,

Fairbanks wrote:

The difference between mechanical and divine is temporal. Not in the common sense that time can run forwards or backwards as appears permitted by many fomulas in physics, but in the sense that something happens temporally if it is predictable and non-temporally if it is organic, which idea appears in one small previously unnoticed paragraph in one thick philosophy book in the dangerously huge stack of philosophy books by my study desk. Those who speed-read philosophy would have missed it and I might never find it again.

I hope your pile does not fall, but I would suggest that organic as commonly used has to do with the molecules built around the carbon atom.. And atomic chemistry is hardly divine, because it is rather like mechanics, and has predictable causes and effects, as you say, in time, one following the other... What we consider divine is beyond our understanding, beyond prediction, in time or out of time... No body wants my books when they plant me.. I dog ear my progress through them, and when I find a page of interest, I dog ear the bottom to point at the offending line so I can judge it as I find it... But It is too easy to lose a well reasoned line, and you have my sympathy... I see from your quotation that you have read some Johnson... Last year I found a full sized life of Johnson, and not the small abridged copies that are usually found... That man was a scholar, and he had a profound effect on English letters... What he said of Americans was expressed well "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

@Fairbanks,

Fairbanks wrote:

In the greater meaning of 'mechanical' include everything that physics and chemistry predicts with its powerful math. Nowhere in physics or math is either the civil state, this post, or the Internet predicted. Nor even why a bee would choose a particular flower to light upon.

The complexity of limitless variables steal the strength out of math... Science predicts in isolation and in gross speaks truth...

@Fido,

Fido wrote:

The complexity of limitless variables steal the strength out of math... Science predicts in isolation and in gross speaks truth...

That's when they turn to statistical mechanics. But, though the math is violated immediately the production of not one of these posts is predictable. True, the arguments tend to be unvarying in gross.

@saiboimushi,

Sartre says existence precedes essence, Descartes says I think therefore I am, Nietzsche says I am therefore I think! Nietzsche,the great life affirmer, says "life is the will to power and nothing more". Deleuze says " desiring machines that is all there is". Homer has Thetis say "the most tragic thing on earth is man, his life is but a day".

Nietzsche was pissed at Socrates because he let the cat out of the bag. The dying words of that great "pied piper" of Athens: "O Crito we owe a rooster to Asclepius",in other words, life is a disease. Nietzsche wished Socrates would of kept this terrifying secret to himself. In the words of Bertram, "Was his (Nietzsche) extreme, Dionysiac paen to life, and to life alone, only a kind of silence, beneath which a great educator for life did not believe in life?". And so the saga goes from Hamlet to Unamuno: life sucks and then you die! So what will it be guys and girls, The red pill or the blue pill?

Or shall we take our artist brush and paint our own picture of the "House of Being"?

@saiboimushi,

Define "being"? Who are you...Bill Clinton? You gotta know what the word "is" means.

@Bonaventurian,

Bonaventurian wrote:

Define "being"? Who are you...Bill Clinton? You gotta know what the word "is" means.

Don't be so sure... I think we spend our entire lives trying to define being, and for that purpose, our lives, another definition another person comes up with will not do...

@goethe10,

goethe10 wrote:

Sartre says existence precedes essence, Descartes says I think therefore I am, Nietzsche says I am therefore I think! Nietzsche,the great life affirmer, says "life is the will to power and nothing more". Deleuze says " desiring machines that is all there is". Homer has Thetis say "the most tragic thing on earth is man, his life is but a day".

Nietzsche was pissed at Socrates because he let the cat out of the bag. The dying words of that great "pied piper" of Athens: "O Crito we owe a rooster to Asclepius",in other words, life is a disease. Nietzsche wished Socrates would of kept this terrifying secret to himself. In the words of Bertram, "Was his (Nietzsche) extreme, Dionysiac paen to life, and to life alone, only a kind of silence, beneath which a great educator for life did not believe in life?". And so the saga goes from Hamlet to Unamuno: life sucks and then you die! So what will it be guys and girls, The red pill or the blue pill?

Or shall we take our artist brush and paint our own picture of the "House of Being"?

As we conceive so shall we be... The quality of our lives will never be better than our conceptions of reality are true...

@Fido,

From dictionary of philosophy:ontology:The study of the essential characteristics of being.....

Ontology (existential):The study of the inescapable psychic features of life such as death,fear,dread,suffering,responsibility,anguish,alienation.

Yea, like we can some how get out of being and have a Gods eye view, or better known as the view from nowhere. The experience of being is epistemic in nature. Depends on what form of life is experiencing. Judgements about life are purely interpretive. So What is it like "to be" a bat.

@goethe10,

goethe10 wrote:

From dictionary of philosophy:ontology:The study of the essential characteristics of being.....

Ontology (existential):The study of the inescapable psychic features of life such as death,fear,dread,suffering,responsibility,anguish,alienation.

Yea, like we can some how get out of being and have a Gods eye view, or better known as the view from nowhere. The experience of being is epistemic in nature. Depends on what form of life is experiencing. Judgements about life are purely interpretive. So What is it like "to be" a bat.

Easy question to be a bat is to be alive...If the bat is alive... His life is our life, continuous from the biginning.

@saiboimushi,

I would say, being is any sort of awareness.
If an individual has any sort of awareness it has being, if it were to lose all awareness it would cease to be an individual and become a object and thous have no being.

@catfood phil,

catfood wrote:

I would say, being is any sort of awareness.
If an individual has any sort of awareness it has being, if it were to lose all awareness it would cease to be an individual and become a object and thous have no being.

I would say your definition excludes rocks and includes Jellyfish... That does not mean it is wrong, and it is nice to feel included...

@Fido,

Fido wrote:

I would say your definition excludes rocks and includes Jellyfish... That does not mean it is wrong, and it is nice to feel included...

For the individual being is awareness of any sort, for the inanimate being is any sort of awareness of it.
Dues a rock have being before or after an individual has awareness of it?

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