A question for Leo Gura

[Fede83]

Spinozism is a philosophical system posed by Baruch Spinoza in which God is indistinguishable of nature, all of existence and the laws that underpin it. His most well-known followers include Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Lessing.

Neuro-Spinozism aka athenism uses our current neurological understanding of the brain to give answers to the criticism on Spinozism. We have the ability to detach a concept related to a core emotion and rewire it with the brain’s reward system, and with the help of the we can submit our emotional drive to logic.

Is this a legit thingh ? Wanna sincerely heard ur opinion about.

[Nak Khid]

On 3/30/2019 at 1:18 AM, Leo Gura said:

From what I now understand, reality is not just a grab-bag of every possibility. It is highly selective. Yet it is still EVERYTHING.

This part is paradoxical.

On 3/30/2019 at 2:26 AM, tsuki said:

@Leo Gura Sounds a lot like Spinoza's God as necessity. Have you read him?

On 3/30/2019 at 4:32 AM, Leo Gura said:

@tsuki I have not read him, but of course Spinoza was speaking from some truth.

Yes, Infinity is a necessity. And yet at the same time it seems to have free will too. Paradoxical.

 

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, Fede83 said:

Is this a legit thingh ? Wanna sincerely heard ur opinion about.

No, this is silliness compared to nonduality. Don't waste your time, just eat a magic mushroom.

[Nak Khid]

On 11/7/2018 at 9:58 PM, Leo Gura said:

Of course Spinoza knew what's up.

He was a Western mystic. Apparently a hero of Einstein's.

Check out Bishop George Berkeley too.

[Nak Khid]

5 hours ago, Fede83 said:

Spinozism is a philosophical system posed by Baruch Spinoza in which God is indistinguishable of nature, all of existence and the laws that underpin it. His most well-known followers include Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Lessing.

Neuro-Spinozism aka athenism uses our current neurological understanding of the brain to give answers to the criticism on Spinozism. We have the ability to detach a concept related to a core emotion and rewire it with the brain’s reward system, and with the help of the we can submit our emotional drive to logic.

Is this a legit thingh ? Wanna sincerely heard ur opinion about.

If I am not mistaken Leo believes God is love and love is acceptance 

[silene]

With respect to Spinoza, I'll play devil's advocate for a bit. If God and Nature are simply the same thing, what's the actual philosophy here apart from using different names for the same thing? How is this any more than word games? A monotheist may prefer the word 'God', and a pagan or nature mystic may prefer 'Nature'. These are cultural and language differences rather than having any philosophical substance aren't they? God = Love = Acceptance may be true, but this is about redefining words in a broader way than before, to help us make connections in our actual experience. To appeal to a broader mindset perhaps? 

[Leo Gura]

@silene Behind the words is a new state of cosciousness which you lack.

[Nak Khid]

3 hours ago, silene said:

With respect to Spinoza, I'll play devil's advocate for a bit. If God and Nature are simply the same thing, what's the actual philosophy here apart from using different names for the same thing? How is this any more than word games? A monotheist may prefer the word 'God', and a pagan or nature mystic may prefer 'Nature'. These are cultural and language differences rather than having any philosophical substance aren't they? God = Love = Acceptance may be true, but this is about redefining words in a broader way than before, to help us make connections in our actual experience. To appeal to a broader mindset perhaps? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism

 

Except God, no substance can be or be conceived.
-Spinoza

 

During his time, this statement was seen as literally equating the existing world with God - for which he was accused of atheism.

Spinoza's doctrine was considered radical at the time he published, and he was widely seen as the most infamous atheist-heretic of Europe. His philosophy was part of the philosophic debate in Europe during the Enlightenment, along with Cartesianism. Specifically, Spinoza disagreed with Descartes on substance duality, Descartes' views on the will and the intellect, and the subject of free will.[3]

In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent "organism." Spinoza argued that everything is a derivative of God, interconnected with all of existence. Although humans experience only thought and extension, what happens to one aspect of existence will affect others. Thus, Spinozism teaches a form of determinism and ecology, and uses these as a basis for morality.

Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind. More specifically, he defined intuition as the ability of the human intellect to intuit knowledge based upon its accumulated understanding of the world

The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism, atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:

the unity of all that exists;

the regularity of all that happens; and

the identity of spirit and nature.

Spinoza's "God or Nature" [Deus sive Natura] provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical "First Cause" or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Coleridge and Shelley saw in Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature[9] and called him the "God-intoxicated Man."[10][11] Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism."[10]

Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that was different from that of traditional Judeo–Christian monotheism. "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...."Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God differs from the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God who cares about humanity.

Comparison to Eastern philosophies

Similarities between Spinoza's philosophy and Eastern philosophical traditions have been discussed by many authorities. The 19th-century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstücker was one of the early figures to notice the similarities between Spinoza's religious conceptions and the Vedanta tradition of India, writing that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy which occupies a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta, that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus, did his biography not satisfy us that he was wholly unacquainted with their doctrines... We mean the philosophy of Spinoza, a man whose very life is a picture of that moral purity and intellectual indifference to the transitory charms of this world, which is the constant longing of the true Vedanta philosopher... comparing the fundamental ideas of both we should have no difficulty in proving that, had Spinoza been a Hindu, his system would in all probability mark a last phase of the Vedanta philosophy."[18][19]

It has been said that Spinozism is similar to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga. Though within the various existing Indian traditions there exist many traditions which astonishingly had such similar doctrines from ages, out of which most similar and well known are the Kashmiri Shaivism and Nath tradition, apart from already existing Samkhya and Yoga.[20]

Max Muller, in his lectures, noted the striking similarities between Vedanta and the system of Spinoza, saying "the Brahman, as conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza's 'Substantia'."[21] Helena Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society also compared Spinoza's religious thought to Vedanta, writing in an unfinished essay "As to Spinoza's Deity – natura naturans – conceived in his attributes simply and alone; and the same Deity – as natura naturata or as conceived in the endless series of modifications or correlations, the direct outflowing results from the properties of these attributes, it is the Vedantic Deity pure and simple.

Edited November 18, 2019 by Nak Khid

[silene]

@Nak Khid   Thanks for the explanation, I'm taking off my devil's advocate hat now  I think we need to read Spinoza in his historical context, when there was a big dualistic divide between the natural and supernatural worlds. He was revolutionary enough to collapse the duality into a monistic or pantheist view. Nowadays, if you come from an essentially stage orange materialistic atheist culture (as I do), supernatural God is already out if the equation, and we have a material form of monism. Therefore, the relevance of Spinoza today is to bring back God / Nature / Consciousness as equal to physical matter, so we can transcend all these limited ideas.

@Leo Gura   you're right, I haven't reached this level of consciousness in a stable way yet, but I have had brief glimpses. I'm working on it (just started a journal), and however good the philosophy is, I know it's a pale shadow of the real thing. 

[Pharion]

The "clicking" thing idea of Athene was part of my journey to discovering spirituality proper. While it is and was a very interesting idea, the main issue I see is that he offers no reliable of way of clicking. It's a theory without a practice. Fun to entertain as an idea, but hard to actualize. I could be wrong, its now been about two years since I stopped investigating Athene, but at least his is bringing people into the right ball park of ideas, and leading them  close to the proverbial rabbit hole. His philosophy has a purpose, but its use is, I think, more to turn people on to better ideas than it is a path to be followed itself. If anyone knows of a practical method or practice advocated by Athene's followers so that one can "click" I would be interested to hear it.