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Re:Perennial philosophy by dr_dshiv on Monday March 02, 2020 @08:06AM (#22464007)
That's good. This does seem to assume, a bit too strongly for my taste, that spirituality is only contained in the nothing/non-thought.

For another model, I see the way science and spirituality were integrated in the early days of the scientific revolution by folks like Kepler, Mersenne, Kircher, Descartes, Leibniz, Hooke, Newton, etc.

All adopted a spiritual frame of (roughly) "there is a universal harmony" and a scientific frame "I can articulate and understand this harmony through empirical data and mathematical modeling". The spiritual side deeply motivated them as individuals to conduct science. The data inevitably showed that their original ideas of universal harmony weren't quite right -- but that there was ample evidence for the real universal harmony, which were taken as both scientific and spiritual insights.

Re:Perennial philosophy by curo on Monday March 02, 2020 @08:13AM (#22464057)
Absolutely, it's certainly auspicious when your life work is an act of devotion. And also it would be too strong for my taste as well to say devotion and contemplation is only contained in some sort of nothing-apart-from-something. To harmonize them would be to realize that nothing can be apart from Nothing (and so all is allowed).
Re:Perennial philosophy by dr_dshiv on Monday March 02, 2020 @08:22AM (#22464126)
> nothing can be apart from Nothing

Clarify? There are mysteries in the one, such as the fact that if there is something surrounded by nothing (like a black dot on a sheet of paper), that is already a Twoness, not a Oneness.

Re:Perennial philosophy by curo on Monday March 02, 2020 @08:41AM (#22464293)
You can allow for conceptual twoness but both have to exist within the same space. Space itself is said to pervade the sheet, the dot, the pencil, etc. So if you take one more step back from space, then you say, in which common substratum do space, time, constraints, etc exist? What pervades these like space pervades the sheet and dot?

A panpsychist would say whatever this is, it must contain the most fundamental building blocks from which we derive conscious experience. But you don't have to go that far, you just have to sit still and inquire into that original zero point that allows for your own individual (seemingly dualistic) subject experience.

You could make an analogy (this is borrowed from Advaita): yes there are many waves on an ocean, but the ocean itself is one. Conceptually there are many waves but in reality there isn't anything such as a wave.

Similarly your own bubble of conscious experience is tied to local instrumentation (your eyes, your brain, etc). But like bubbles in a basin of soapy water, it's really not substantially apart.

If you think of matter probabilistically, you realize the best analog is just "information" — every experience of this information arises from something. Of course twoness in this information is a matter of fact, but it's easy enough to say yes, these are abstractions of One. Or these are abstractions of Zero.

It's just a matter of language and what you prescribe to reality or what you prescribe to conceptual illusion.