Original post: jack hectic
Lord Ruthven;331541 wrote:I have heard this argument before, but to me it makes 'God' so nebulous as to be a worthless construct philosophically. We are all connected in some way by being in the universe, for example, but such a link is so vague as to be worthless. Yes, you can alter the world around you be your Will - if I didn't think that I wouldn't be involved in the Work - but is there any point to the visualisation that you are doing it thanks to the tenuous link of the univeral conscious.
Personally, the visions I've seen suggest to me the real transcendence is pulling out of the universal conscious and being of truly independent thought and 'power'. That is an element I am only just beginning to explore myself, however.
I don't think those connections and the simplicity of God makes it worthless, on the contrary, in physics the observer is everything. The observer is what shapes reality. So, if the observer is God in that he has all things and their opposites (good/evil, beauty/ugliness, big/small, mercy/severity), than God is supremely neutral, and the universe can be observed in its natural beauty, without changing it. At least, thats my two sense, and as a consequence and blessing of this philosophy, I must respect differing views because if mine was the only viewpoint, I would only be seeing a small fraction of the universe and blocking out all else.
By my perspective, what you call transcendence could be two things: you could be descending further into illusion (reality is an illusion that is shared by many, and by severing yourself from the many you could be simply in a universe of uncontrolled illusion). The importance of this is that, by being only a small portion of the whole, your own personal universe may be incomplete and imperfect (however an opposing view could be that it would simply be another universe. Like if the entire universe was evil, there would be no concept of good and no evil to counter either, and new opposites would arise). The other view would be that your transcendence is unification with God and, since you would be the ONLY observer in the universe, you of course would be capable of independent thought. See, as humans and gods we are only partial observers, like imaginary friends of a psychotic. By the imaginary friends unifying with the psychotic, the fragmented person becomes whole and sane again.