05-24-2021, 11:12 PM
@J.W., I think there's a very basic difference in our perspectives. I think that microcosm-macrocosm differences have everything to do with how people are part of all, and that a flat "all is one" view is too misleading when, for example, people begin to think about the creator as having attitudes in response to human experiences.
I think the creator doesn't have any attitudes about human experience, because such attitudes are really too much like human attitudes, and can only exist close to the human level of the larger cosmos with its levels.
For thousands of years, religious and spiritual beliefs have often included a transformation to come soon, from the miserable and wretched present (in which people have had enough of suffering) to a nicer future state of things. For thousands of years, history has moved on without such a transformation occuring. What's the difference now, compared to very similar beliefs and attitudes throughout history, where people also had all kinds of ideas about why they were right when people before them had been wrong?
Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, had this to say: "... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in -- an interesting hole I find myself in -- fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."
I think experiences with all of their intensity at lower levels of the cosmos are dwarfed, and cease to matter at all, by what exists on larger levels. In the grand scheme of things, human beings in relation to "the creator" may simply be like molecules of gas in relation to the solar system.
I think the creator doesn't have any attitudes about human experience, because such attitudes are really too much like human attitudes, and can only exist close to the human level of the larger cosmos with its levels.
For thousands of years, religious and spiritual beliefs have often included a transformation to come soon, from the miserable and wretched present (in which people have had enough of suffering) to a nicer future state of things. For thousands of years, history has moved on without such a transformation occuring. What's the difference now, compared to very similar beliefs and attitudes throughout history, where people also had all kinds of ideas about why they were right when people before them had been wrong?
Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, had this to say: "... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in -- an interesting hole I find myself in -- fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."
I think experiences with all of their intensity at lower levels of the cosmos are dwarfed, and cease to matter at all, by what exists on larger levels. In the grand scheme of things, human beings in relation to "the creator" may simply be like molecules of gas in relation to the solar system.