What is reality, what is a 2x4?

[jupiviv]

Why not? He may enjoy being evil, i.e, disapproved of by everyone who is good.

More likely, he enjoys the notoriety of being evil. But behind that, in the core of his being, he would believe himself to be good - or at least not loathsome enough to want to torture himself to death.

So your definition of evil here is something that is disapproved, and of good is something that is approved. This is a dualism. Someone else may define pleasure as good and pain as evil(or vice versa), which is also a dualism. My point is that you can't escape this dualistic thinking as long as you are being conscious. The distinction between good and evil does not exist for a fully unconscious being. So the fully conscious being doesn't go beyond good and evil.

[guest_of_logic]

Liberty Sea, I want to clarify my response to your definition and analysis of evil, because I didn't read you carefully enough initially. My initial reading of what you meant was "to be evil is to be factually incorrect", as in, to calculate the sum of two and three as twenty is to be evil, which, it seems to me, would be an ill-informed definition of evil. Now, I see that you mean something more like "to be evil is to be morally wrong (immoral)", and in that case I acknowledge your definition (to that extent) as legitimate.

Your analysis then can be summarised as: "God and the devil have different standards of morality, and by each one's relative morality, each views himself as moral (good) and his counterpart as immoral (evil), or, at least, as in the devil's view of God, not necessarily moral".

I would respond, then, that there are certain constraints by definition on the words "good" and "moral" that do not permit a totally relative morality: if the devil calls torture, pestilence, disease, famine, poverty and war "good", then he is redefining the word for his own purposes. That redefinition is not one that those who typically use the English language would accept (at least in the absence of a higher purpose in that torture, pestilence, etc - that is, one such as the suggestion I made that evil exists to force the evolution of good).

In summary, "evil" in the English language means more than just "[morally] wrong" - it includes an understanding of what that entails, and so, if you are to argue that the devil doesn't view himself as "evil", then you are going to need a new word to convey what you mean (perhaps "unjustified"?), because, given the definition of the word in the English language, he has no choice but to view himself as evil.

---

Another thought on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

An alternative (or parallel) reading to that of my last post is that Blake is actually counselling against marrying heaven and hell, as in the "Memorable Fancy" section in which he describes the Prolific (Giants) and the Devouring. He writes of these that:

"These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.
Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two".

The more I read this work, the more complex it seems.

--

guest_of_logic: I think it is probably true that evil delights in being evil.

jupiviv: And good delights in being good. But is it good to delight in being good, and is it evil to delight in being evil? Perhaps it is good to regret being good, and evil to regret being evil.

You might gather from what I wrote above to Liberty Sea that I understand the words "good" and "evil" to have certain definitions in the English language such that, by definition, it is:

• good to delight in being good
• evil to delight in being evil
• evil to regret being good (noting a certain paradoxical quality to this)
• good to regret being evil.

[jupiviv]

You might gather from what I wrote above to Liberty Sea that I understand the words "good" and "evil" to have certain definitions in the English language such that, by definition, it is:

good to delight in being good
evil to delight in being evil
evil to regret being good (noting a certain paradoxical quality to this)
good to regret being evil.

My point was that the words "good" and "evil" are just words and can be defined in many ways. If one person defines good in a different way from another, then he will consider it evil to delight in being good as the other person defines the word. Most of the conflicts between good and evil arise because deluded people are beyond good and evil, that is, unable to define good and evil properly. They just do whatever feels good.

[guest_of_logic]

My point was that the words "good" and "evil" are just words and can be defined in many ways.

Perhaps you already realise that I mostly disagree with you then. As I've already communicated, those words have some flexibility, but not to the point that, for example, torture, pestilence, famine,war etc can be defined as "good", at least not without contorting the word beyond its actual definition - a definition that is not arbitrary, at least if you wish to communicate with other English speakers in common terms.

[Talking Ass]

Pestilence, though---you have to admit---is very, VERY good for the crows! I think you have to make a separation between acts consciously committed by humans and (essentially) the activities of...microbes.

Evil is evil especially when it is chosen, inflicted, justified. Hitler consciously chose to munder millions. The plague also took out many millions (18 million?) One was chosen and the other...natural inevitability.

Is the 100 k diameter meteor flying toward Earth right now, having been on that collision course since the Beginning, 'evil'?

[guest_of_logic]

"Is the 100 k diameter meteor flying toward Earth right now, having been on that collision course since the Beginning, 'evil'?" --Talking Ass

Does that not depend, good donkey friend - if some conscious Source had settled that course, with no higher goal than destruction, might not our deduction be: wanton?

P.S. What 100 k diameter meteor? Seems I'm out of touch with the news.

[cousinbasil]

OK, so that's two votes against the notion of evil as force for evolution of good. What would you guys suggest, then, is the answer to the question of why and how evil exists and is permitted to exist?

This is really the question, is it not? If the answer were readily forthcoming, as easily obtainable as when one orders the Pu-Pu platter* in a Chinese restaurant - why, then where would all the atheists hide?

As it happens, I do know the answer, but have a devil of time (pardon the expression) of explaining it. You see, literally nothing can not be be conceived of as a "force for evolution of good." This includes dog turds and dust motes, but concentrating on things like that will render any meaningful observation rather less meaningful.

So let's stick to the main players here. And as always, the elephant in the center of any philosophical room is Time - definitely a main player.

Let's imagine the cosmology of physics to be pathetically incomplete - and even in error - when it comes to yielding the size (or any other characteristic) of the Cosmos. One can find physicists' estimates of the number of atoms in the universe - god bless their pointed little heads. Let us imagine that Heaven is not a place on earth, but rather someplace else. Logically, that has to mean - somewhere out there. Let us imagine that beings exist out there whose forms are not wrapped in heavy, carbon-based stuff, but who are spiritual beings of rarer and rarer constitution, yet who also reside somewhere, and that such somewheres are also spheres - not planets, but rather immense constructed architectural objects. Let us imagine then, that the concept of time must be different for beings who do not undergo birth or death, at least not the way humans do and in the relatively short span of time we have available.

Well, if this is not heaven (the here and now), and heaven is what you need or aspire to, then the above is as good a possibility as any other. Perhaps heaven is a condition, which spreads from an epicenter of the cosmos of space and time like a mushroom cloud, to the outer-most regions containing sentient life.

But a man is not merely a spectator - he can choose to be a participant. He can help bring his vision of the ultimate Triumph of Good - the era during which the Mushroom Cloud of the Spirit being "poured out upon all flesh" engulfs us. Between then and now, that which hinders this ultimate achievement of spirit is evil - which simply can no more succeed than the most elaborate sandcastle on a beach during even the gentlest storm. And the love of God is a Tsunami.

When observed from a mere human's perspective, the existence evil may seem like something necessary, if only transiently, for good to exist. It may even seem like it is permitted to exist - when even now the Tsunami approaches.

Evil only 'exists' in the human world, don't you think?

Just so.

There is no hell but the extinction of choosing to embrace evil, for only the person who is committed to evil - even iniquity - is truly mortal.

Lastly, Edmund Burke is often quoted as having said:
"All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing."
If you ever wonder whether David Quinn is truly any kind of genius - even the kind which he himself has defined - wonder no more! For if evil and good are equivalent, and finding the Tao is impossible if one endeavors to do good things - then the forces of evil cannot win. Of course, this is what I argue above, but David goes one more, because what will happen will happen regardless if one chooses to do a good thing or not. Presumably David refrains from doing evil things; but the point is if good and evil are equivalent, he has no desire to be a "good man" in the Burkian sense; therefore is just fine to do nothing. David - admit it! You have embraced/developed a consistent philosophy that logically leads one to conclude it is OK to do nothing!! Nay, the philosophy demands one do nothing!

*Don't know if Chinese restaurants ae the same in Australia or Canada, but here in the USA the menus in Chinese restaurants are always huge with a million dishes described in tiny red-and-black print. If you will study such a menu for any length of time, you will notice that every place's menu has at least one mistake in it. My favorite one so far was in a hidden gem of an eatery on the second floor on Upper Broadway. The Pu-Pu Platter was described as "...defecately seasoned..."

[Talking Ass]

What about the tsunami in Japan? Do you see that as having.been engineered or conjured by evil.forces? Again, evil only occurs in the human world and among beings who can make choices. In the determined world around us, 'choices, in that sense are never made. But our consciousness occurs in or arises.in this material, causal environment. Our consciousness as it were goes to battle with this existential fact. This battle occurs in us: the battle of Heaven and Hell.

Consciousness can gain many advantages over random causation that ignorance cannot. But it seems.hard to ascribe 'evil' to random, 'determined' events.

[cousinbasil]

"Is the 100 k diameter meteor flying toward Earth right now, having been on that collision course since the Beginning, 'evil'?" --Talking Ass

Does that not depend, good donkey friend - if some conscious Source had settled that course, with no higher goal than destruction, might not our deduction be: wanton?

P.S. What 100 k diameter meteor? Seems I'm out of touch with the news.

It is a fact that in our solar system, the hugely massive planets Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune "sweep" the orbital plane on which earth revolves about the sun. They attract much space debris headed for the solar system and keep the inner planets relatively "safe..."

[jupiviv]

beyond its actual definition

There is no such "actual" definition of the word. It means whatever the person using it happens to mean by it. However, if that person changes the definition from moment to moment while referring to the same thing then he is guilty of contradicting himself. For me personally, "good" means wisdom, for it is only wisdom that can determine correctly what good and evil are.

[cousinbasil]

What about the tsunami in Japan? Do you see that as having.been engineered or conjured by evil.forces? Again, evil only occurs in the human world and among beings who can make choices. In the determined world around us, 'choices, in that sense are never made. But our consciousness occurs in or arises.in this material, causal environment. Outlr consciousness as it were goes to battle with this existential fact. This battle occurs in us: the battle of Heaven and Hell.

Consciousness can gain many advantages over random causation that ignorance cannot. But it seems.hard to ascribe 'evil' to random, 'determined' events.

To me it is evident that no tsunami, hurricane, or volcano can be evil. But the Saturday Night Special toted into the all night gas station surely is.

[guest_of_logic]

As it happens, I do know the answer, but have a devil of time (pardon the expression) of explaining it.

I'm glad you wrote that, because I'm having a fiendishly difficult time understanding your explanation. Here's what I've got so far: heaven, which might be a spiritual state in which, neither being born nor dying, beings live on etheric spheres, might expand out from the centre of the cosmos; in any case, the ultimate triumph of good, whilst hindered by the opposition of evil, is inevitable given God's love.

I've got that, but I don't understand how it answers the question: if the ultimate triumph of good is inevitable by God, then why does He delay it even an instant (by permitting evil to oppose it)?

What about the tsunami in Japan? Do you see that as having.been engineered or conjured by evil.forces? Again, evil only occurs in the human world and among beings who can make choices. In the determined world around us, 'choices, in that sense are never made. But our consciousness occurs in or arises.in this material, causal environment. Our consciousness as it were goes to battle with this existential fact. This battle occurs in us: the battle of Heaven and Hell.

Consciousness can gain many advantages over random causation that ignorance cannot. But it seems.hard to ascribe 'evil' to random, 'determined' events.

Oh, but my question was a conditional: if a Being had settled the course of destruction, then we (I) would consider it an evil act. I'm not saying I believe that that's the truth of the matter, simply that it's a possibility. As for tsunamis and other natural disasters, again it's possible (from what I know or rather don't know) that they are engineered by conscious entities, but really, I'm ignorant of the truth of it, and so it's best I hold my tongue.

There is no such "actual" definition of the word ["good"]. It means whatever the person using it happens to mean by it.

And is it your contention that this applies to any word, or do you single out the word "good" as a special case (and if so, why?)?

[jupiviv]

And is it your contention that this applies to any word, or do you single out the word "good" as a special case (and if so, why?)?

It applies to any word. I don't know why you'd think I meant that it applied exclusively to the word "good".

[Talking Ass]

Laird,

Well, if you were to decide that tsunamis and volcanic eruptions were caused by.conscious beings, you might decide to take up residence in a worldview that sees those forces as demigods. Then, naturally (and here the fun begins!) You would.likely try yo work out a relationship either to the Gods or Supreme Gods who have dominion over the demigods (ultimately), and perhaps pull together a skilled.priesthood who, through mysterios manipulation of Oration or Mantra or what-have-you, and of course through sacrifice (huge assemblies of.Brahmins intoning hymns and chants), succeed in altering Reality, appeasing the demigods, keeping them from having.existential.freak outs and destroying the earth and humankind. You would.see.humankind as part-and-parcel of the Rta, or Cosmic Order, which is defines.as an interplay of three (or various) levels of material reality, but which priesthood is aware.of, and to whom they sirect their energy and devotion to keep Rta in good order. You might also.see.this world, our world, as an intermediate world.for.migrating zouls; some.heading.up toward celestial realms, some heading down into materialism.and to.bondage. You would become aware of a Cosmic Struggle between conscious and unconscious forces and would likely.align yourself with the celestial road of ascension. You would do this by entering into.a.covenant of eternal service to the Supreme Lord, the mysterious author of this creation, this Grand Game of consciousness in which we participate.

[cousinbasil]

I'm glad you wrote that, because I'm having a fiendishly difficult time understanding your explanation. Here's what I've got so far: heaven, which might be a spiritual state in which, neither being born nor dying, beings live on etheric spheres, might expand out from the centre of the cosmos; in any case, the ultimate triumph of good, whilst hindered by the opposition of evil, is inevitable given God's love.

I've got that, but I don't understand how it answers the question: if the ultimate triumph of good is inevitable by God, then why does He delay it even an instant (by permitting evil to oppose it)?

Because it is not a magic act. Because it is a real interplay between forces within the vastness of the cosmos. You cannot eradicate what you perceive as evil in an instant. And neither can the Lord, without also eradicating the very freedoms which facilitate it. You are asking, then why does God choose not to? If he did declare that in the next five seconds, all evil would disappear, when would those five seconds have begun? The first time you noticed there was such a thing as evil?

I do not see ignorance as the same thing as evil. Ignorance is the inevitable consequence of an arena in which spiritual beings are born. People will have endless patience correcting the ignorance of their children. Sadly, many parents will not recognize willful evil in those same offspring once they are grown.

Your question depends entirely on what the definition of an "instant" is. There we have it again - the elephant in the room. Time.

Free yourself from that, and you free yourself from the limitations of ego and impatience and misunderstanding.

[Dennis Mahar]

There we have it again - the elephant in the room. Time.

Free yourself from that, and you free yourself from the limitations of ego and impatience and misunderstanding.

The elephant in the room is no thing.

No thing exists.

assigning or pretending phenomena exists from its own side is delusional and is to be fooled by appearances.
All is empty.
empty is empty.

[guest_of_logic]

And is it your contention that this applies to any word, or do you single out the word "good" as a special case (and if so, why?)?

It applies to any word. I don't know why you'd think I meant that it applied exclusively to the word "good".

An inside radar bellow a snow-chain I to your sunbeam.

---

TA, it sounds like a trip. I can imagine what the scientists would say, and the sceptics. Perhaps they would be headed down to materialism and bondage, or perhaps they would be convinced through empirical study that the Orations, Mantras and sacrifices actually work - assuming that empirical proof would even be possible, and that it wouldn't be set up so that only those of unshakeable faith despite the contrariness of material knowledge could ascend. I wonder whether this covenant would involve remaining in this intermediate world, guiding souls out of the grip of unconscious forces and upwards into ascending higher consciousness, or whether it would involve personal ascension, and, if so, whether those ascended reach back to pull up those behind them, or whether they look only upwards. Perhaps the priesthood, like shamans, would be capable of navigating up and down through the worlds, bringing back gifts to this world and transmitting gifts from this world to lower worlds. Perhaps they (we) would hasten cousinbasil's ultimate triumph.

(as an aside, this time it wasn't E&M, it was something even more profound. Did you guess? EiE!)

You cannot eradicate what you perceive as evil in an instant. And neither can the Lord, without also eradicating the very freedoms which facilitate it.

Perhaps, then, at core yours is a free will defence of evil. And yet, you believe in the ultimate triumph of good - for consistency then do you maintain that this ultimate triumph involves the eradication of free will?

You are asking, then why does God choose not to? If he did declare that in the next five seconds, all evil would disappear, when would those five seconds have begun? The first time you noticed there was such a thing as evil?

It's more like I'm asking, why did He choose to allow it from the very beginning, when we could have had the ultimate triumph of good right from the start, without the painful process of getting to it?

[Talking Ass]

He's got A LOT of free time on His hands?

[guest_of_logic]

That He won't have after the triumph?

[Talking Ass]

The model I presented (crudely) is the Vedanta model, or Vedanta-Vaishnava. This is an old, old model from a certain kind of 'mapping' of the world. This Map was understood to be 'the way things are', and life was lived within it. I am not saying that I think 'this is the way things are'. I think we exist within the remains of old models for organizing perception. Where in this old 'Vedic' lore they seems to have imagined that certain men with certain mantric or other powers might act in nature or direct or control nature, they developed no material science to speak of, and so it remained fantasy. But they did seem capable of tremendous self-awareness and they also grasped man's addiction to material pleasure (and became expert psychologists). But in the West by following other roads, 'we' became the ones to penetrate nature's mysteries and to start a process of discovery that completely changed the courae of everything. It didn't come about through intoning mantras, it came about through rational manipulation of matter.

These new modalities have totally up-turned all the old aystems for organizing perception and for 'locating' ourselves in our Reality. We are.in a place of almost inconceivable shifting of ground.

My reasons for introducing some of this stuff is to question you about your own system for organizing your perception of yourself in your reality. If you are truly a Manichean, you would also have access to a potency existing outside and.beyond: that which corresponds to the Christian Savior. Every man I suggest has a 'novelesque', a novel-like world containing a 'map' of his grasp of himself in this 'reality', this cosmos. We look through this 'map' and see reality. If our map is defective, we literally are lost in the territory of our existence. If we are the territory of our existence without a Guide, and if numerous models of existence (in a nightmarish novelesque) combine inharmoniously, I think we might be in a certain trouble.

[Talking Ass]

PS: and there are maps/models that offer 'explanations' as to why and even how these giant games of creation are carried out. Lila is one. Game. Play. Games of hide-and-seek. Or, our deliberate falling. God losing so as to recover. The delight in a game of 'dawn' and dawning awareness. All of our life, all of thousands of years, not even relevant as time-segments. From at least one perspective, there has never been any separation from unity with that which created us. We are part-and-parcel of that and there is no way to ever change that. Except in some 'voluntary', decisive act in which we choose...to descend to the 'here', to this place. They say: this is an illusion. It is not so. But it is an illusion difficult to wake from. And in that are the mysteries of the dawning.

Conceptual models are important. A conceptual model that allows.no movement or progress (neither enlightenment or salvation) is said to be part-and-parcel of deadly illusion. We find ourselves in boxes and can't get out. I suggest that Consciousness itself.established 'conceptual pathways' and that they are always there. Unfortunately, they are not always cleary defined. Or they are shrouded in desperation, fanaticism, and many levels.of confusion.

[cousinbasil]

Perhaps, then, at core yours is a free will defence of evil. And yet, you believe in the ultimate triumph of good - for consistency then do you maintain that this ultimate triumph involves the eradication of free will?

It's more like I'm asking, why did He choose to allow it from the very beginning, when we could have had the ultimate triumph of good right from the start, without the painful process of getting to it?

It is always possible to ask why things are not other than they manifestly are.

If I answer yes, to the first question, then wouldn't that imply the answer to your second? Perhaps I am not phrasing this properly, but I believe these two questions to be contradictory.

If it is consistent to believe that the ultimate triumph of good involves the eradication of free will, then how could you ask why he chose to allow anything over which good could triumph at all? You are implying that the only consistent view is that mankind should never have had free will at all!

I suggest the truth is the answer. It is what it is! We do have free will; evil does exist; those two things are not in the slightest contradictory. And that logically does not imply evil need exist in order for free will to exist.

"For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:30). Translation: what you decide might not have immediately obvious consequences to you. But is is important to me, for I shall always be with you, as I shall be with the least of my brethren.

At the very core of so much misunderstanding is the fucked up beyond words belief that "Christ died for our sins." This tenet alone makes formal or institutional Christianity an abomination in the eyes of the Ancients of Days! Christ died because of the sins of the world, not fucking for them. Understand this, and perhaps one can have a truer meaning of what it means to be a Christian. Evil is not necessary for good. One can clearly envision a world absent of evil; can one just as easily envision a world absent of good?

[cousinbasil]

Evil is not necessary for good.

IOW, what if the question was never, what is the lesser of two evils? But rather always, what is the greater of two goods...?

[Dennis Mahar]

(as an aside, this time it wasn't E&M, it was something even more profound. Did you guess? EiE!)

Good work!
It's sinking in.
Medicine is hard to stomach at first.
It's scary, I know, you'll just have to Man up a bit.

a tabula rasa inherently devoid of identity

the emporer has no clothes

an empty suit

existence precedes your narrative

[guest_of_logic]

"These new modalities have totally up-turned all the old aystems for organizing perception and for 'locating' ourselves in our Reality. We are.in a place of almost inconceivable shifting of ground." --Talking Ass

The peculiar thing, for me, is that the old systems still often seem to "function", by which I mean "represent reality truthfully". This puzzles me, to the point that I've even written on another forum that it feels as though reality "wants" all belief systems to be simultaneously true. For example, I've seen that the Australian Aborigines are right: that there are spirits in the land. This suggests to me that their "system for organising perception", the Dreaming, in which ancestor spirits shaped the land before becoming embedded in it, is a truthful representation of reality, and yet it is totally at odds with the "new modality" of geology, in which the landscape was formed by natural processes, and which has its own justification.

I also have had experiences and have read much and heard much from others that leads me to conclude that the human soul is separate (or can be separated) from the human body, which suggests that the "old system" beliefs of the creation of the human soul are true, and yet this is totally at odds with the modern science of evolution, which has no room for a created soul, yet for which there are equally compelling reasons to believe as true.

These parallelisms of truth might be the 'conceptual pathways' of which you write of Consciousness itself establishing, but why would Consciousness establish conceptual pathways that are inconsistent - why confuse us? In any case, finding myself unable to resolve these truth parallelisms, it's possibly accurate to describe myself, as you write, as "lost in the territory of our existence [..] without a Guide, and [..] in a certain trouble", particularly given that many (not all) of my spiritual experiences have been negative.

I have neither encountered nor developed a system for organising perception that resolves all of the parallelisms I encounter, nor all of my life experiences. The main problem I have with most of these systems, other than irresolvable parallelisms, is, as you might have guessed from this thread, their failure to address the existence of evil. It's all very well that Brahma might construct a playground for His consciousness to split itself up into and enjoy the experience of duality, but why - really, why? - given the choice, would He construct a playground in which He would torture Himself in so many of the different ways in which conscious beings torture one another? It simply makes no sense. This is why I am driven to a manichaean view: the most rational response I can find to the existence of evil in reality given a loving God is that it is somehow intrinsic, perhaps even necessary (hence my suggestion that its role is to evolve the good), but certainly (at least for now) in some sense beyond the power or (justified) will of divinity to eradicate.

Do I, in this interplay between the divine and the demonic, "have access to a potency existing outside and.beyond: that which corresponds to the Christian Savior"? I hope so, at times I believe it; I have even had a profound experience of divine forgiveness involving paranormal occurrences, and yet, somehow, I don't seem to be able to maintain my faith. The experience fades, the world returns to "normal", old patterns re-establish themselves... and so it goes. But you know my existential problems already, and I won't belabour the point.

Cousinbasil, you might see from the above why the question of evil is so important to me, and why I am very so interested to find out that you think you have the answer to it. The problem I'm having is that I'm not getting anything of substance out of your answer. I mean no disrespect by this, it's just that, as important as this question is to me, I won't accept an answer that is even slightly vague or in any way less than 100% rigorous, which, right now, yours seems to me to be.

You suggest I accept as an answer to my question, "truth", that "It is what it is". Surely you can see that this is in no way an answer to my actual question, which is why it is the way that it is. Of course I accept that there is both evil and free will in the world, but that's no answer to why evil exists (even if in parallel with free will). I don't have a clear sense of your own answer yet. I suggested to you that your answer was that free will necessitates evil, but you seemed to reject that notion ("that logically does not imply evil need exist in order for free will to exist"). So, what, then, is your answer other than an appeal for me to accept without questioning?

At the end of your post, you write that "One can clearly envision a world absent of evil". Indeed, one can. The question is why, if God is both loving and omnipotent (which - correct me if I'm wrong - you seem to believe He is), that world isn't realised.