Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by BBella , Sunday, November 08, 2009, 19:17 (5493 days ago) @ Frank Paris

Thank you Frank for going the extra mile in trying to express the inexpressible.
I relate to much of what you say below and what you have posted in past posts. There are a few differences but they are minor and I'm sure comes down, understandably, to perception and differences in expression. -But what is curious to me, is how people have similar or different personal experiences but come out with such a similar conclusion. It doesn't matter what brought the experience about, the conclusions are all very similar. I personally came upon this portal within thru an extreme condition...and I pretty much know, knowing me and the way I thought before this experience, that I would have never found this portal within myself had I not went thru this very experience. -Whether science/medicine/philosophers/Tibetan monks explains their experience as physiological, psychological, mystical or religious, it is an experience humankind has the ability to experience that cannot be denied. Regardless of how or why it happens, it happens! Humans have the ability to experience union with the divine. Who is truly qualified to say whether this is a real experience or not? The brain is going to believe what it sees/experiences. That is just part of it's evolved function! -Just wanted to add a few of my thoughts to the discussion while there is a lull.--> "God has an infinite consciousness which may or may not be physical."
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> Well, here is the paradox. All physical things are finite and so God's consciousness could not be physical. Yet the experience we have in mystical union is of something infinite, and at the same time our consciousness "arises" out of our three pound brain (or however much it weighs: I forget). How is that possible? That's one of the problems with trying to "pin down" descriptions of religious experience, which of course is precisely what you're trying to do. You're trying to reduce religious experience to something finite just because it is grounded in something finite (the three pound lump of physical mush we call a brain).
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> The paradox is that our finite consciousness suddenly "breaks through" its finite origin into the infinite expanses of the divine when it gets "down" to the base of its being and "discovers" that there's an open channel down there to the infinite. As long as you try to analyze this logically, you're going to get into trouble, necessarily concluding that it's all nonsense and baseless. All I can say is that sometimes human beings discover that the apparently limited and finite basis of consciousnes, the human brain, can "break through" to infinite realms. I've tried to "explain" this by attributing it to a "discovery" that there is infinitely more to the potentialities of physical matter when it is sufficiently organized and complex than "reason" allows. Sorry, but that's the best I can do here. It's something that human being just sometimes discover for themselves, regardless of any accompanying scientific and logical reasoning.
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> "He is within and without the universe, and his purpose is to see himself reflected in it."
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> "Within" means he can look up into the world through organisms, when they are sufficiently complex. Then through their consciousness of the world, God can hope to see how matter is revealing his beauty, depth, and expansiveness.
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> The rest of the paragraph you're quoting from is close enough for government work. I'll have to see what you have up your sleeve if I accept that, before I make further clarifications.