Freethought & Rationalism Archive

perfectbite · 02-02-2005, 05:56 PM

Premjan,
I have been giving some thought to the concept of Gaia and it seems that there are a number of ways of looking at the concept of Gaia. Two in particular are 1. that Gaia as a conscious entity involves itself (concepts this big must forsake mere gender) with the evolution of life on the planet as we know it but its time scales are far longer than ours and what is beautiful for us may not be beautiful for the arachnids or vice versa so there seems to be a great deal of anthropomorphism involved with our concept of Gaia and 2. In positing Gaia as a planetary entity manipulating forms of matter to an unknown beautiful or at least harmonious end, the assumption is made that Gaia is conscious but, for me, it is not a given that Gaia realizes or even could realize enlightenment because of its involvement with matter and the next intellectual step, which could be denied to Gaia but open to us humans (and I use the term humans loosely) would be the realization of Mind only. Going from the planetary to the cosmic as it were. That isn't much of an intellectual step but in taking that step matter then becomes an aspect of consciousness and does not have an independent existence apart from cosciousness.

So, to answer your question: I do believe that Gaia or something like Gaia chooses life and that all earthly life benefits from Gaia's caring attention. However, perversely, humankind could destroy Gaia which would be matricide but humankind could not destroy Mind try as it might. The teeniest tiniest microbe tucked away in stasis on the most insignificant barren piece of space rock, far, far from Gaia's knowing on the other side of the galaxy or universe for that matter, has mind. Mind ain't going anywhere but up.

Paraprakrti · 02-02-2005, 09:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by premjan

Do Hindus (OK let's say Vaishnavas) really set a lot of store in prophecies? And is the Bhagavatam definitely datable to pre-Buddhist times? I would bet that it was really easy for some scholar copying this work into written form to insert a comment like this.

I don't know what all the speculative historians say. They often disagree with each other anyway. According to the Srimad Bhagavatam it was written down just after Krishna left earth, some 5,000 years ago.

The Sanskrit, translation and purport by Srila Prabhupada are here:

http://vedabase.net/sb/1/3/24/en

Sure, there is always room to speculate that some scholar added this verse later. We can believe what we want to believe.

Paraprakrti · 02-02-2005, 10:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dharma

the bhakti movement and theism (god as a separate entity) came into Hinduism in a BIG way only after the Islamic and British incursions, perhaps when Indians had less self confidence and could never believe themselves to be God they worship...otherwise, Vedic Hinduism is about the science of the self...

Screw hinduism. "Hinduism" is a product of kali yuga. Vedic teachings accomodate persons of various levels of realization. The impersonalists speculate that any personal form of the absolute truth is under Maya. According to Vedic literatures such as the Bhagavad-Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam that simply is not the fact. The Personality of Godhead is the most confidential of transcendental knowledge and God never falls under maya. The presumption that God falls under maya is ludicrous in more ways than 108.

premjan · 02-03-2005, 12:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paraprakrti

I don't know what all the speculative historians say. They often disagree with each other anyway. According to the Srimad Bhagavatam it was written down just after Krishna left earth, some 5,000 years ago.

The Sanskrit, translation and purport by Srila Prabhupada are here:

http://vedabase.net/sb/1/3/24/en

Sure, there is always room to speculate that some scholar added this verse later. We can believe what we want to believe.

I believe there is a submerged city at Dwaraka whose submergence has been dated to about 1500 BC which does not support a 5000 BC date for the Mahabharata.

I think it is a bit speculative to imagine that the Buddha (and the location of Gaya) could be known in the Bhagavatam which anyway involved Krishna who only sporadically appeared in the East of the country (the false Vaasudeva of Pundra incident is one of them).

Whether it is more speculative to imagine that it was inserted later, is another question.

premjan · 02-03-2005, 12:52 AM

I don't think Gaia is taken too seriously by evolutionists other than as a rather nondescriptive substitute for a totally reductive hypothesis (i.e. some sort of vague "holistic" pattern which we don't understand yet). If there really were a big mind pervading the universe, then information would be able to travel freely from one side of the universe to the other and we would see strange coincidences ("miracles" if you will) without clear cause and effect relationships. Unless mind is just a metaphor and then it is pretty useless for anything except as a belief.

perfectbite · 02-03-2005, 02:17 AM

Premjan,

A philosophy professor of mine used to say that persons are ontologically basic. Perhaps Gaia is ontologically basic too so any limited investigation of Gaia's being could truly only be done by another of Gaia's mentality. It is a matter of scale.

As far as info from the universal mind whizzing around the universe for us to intercept and ponder on you and Paraprakrti are talking about an ancient text a mere 5,000 years old. Dharma seems to think that humanity turned to science because the spiritual side of human nature was either so corrupted in its interpretation that it ceased making sense or that it was so distorted that it ceased being meaningful (six of one, half a dozen of the other) and science worth calling science has only really come into its own within in the last 3 or 4 hundred years and has only been truly useful to humanity for the last 2 hundred years (steam and electricity). For the size of the universe our whole species is as transient as a human blink. For some cosmic beings,
a la Douglas Adams, (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Universe) saying the equivalent of 'Oops' could easily take 15 human generations.

Basically we're just troubled and troublesome onlookers although a very few of us do get to peep through a hole in the fence and those few recognize that miracles happen every day for every one of us but they are so commonplace that they are not considered miracles. In the same way that the self proclaimed reincarnation of Sai Baba is referred to as 'Siddhi Sai Baba', because of his tricks, Dharma's 7 foot tall blonde tap dancing on water would quickly be named 'Siddhi Siegfried' and the novelty would not last.

It could be that we are either fantastically lucky or we are destructive abberations.

premjan · 02-03-2005, 02:27 AM

I sort of doubt that we don't recognize Gaia simply due to vast scale (because we are capable of conceiving of the whole universe "all that is" as a single entity so our minds are pretty scale-insensitive), though complexity could be a problem. Perhaps there is a mind buried somewhere in the universe's details (like the devil) and the connections are so convoluted we just don't have the neurons to grok them yet.

Of course some would view the "unreasonable effectiveness of science (e.g. physics)" as evidence for a global mind, but it might just be evidence of a common root cause (e.g. big bang).

A "mind" (e.g. human mind) basically shows flexible information processing and symbolic thought. Since our minds do it, and we can tell other creatures that do it, and we can think in a scale-insensitive manner, we ought to be able to identify it in the universe, unless the pattern is simply to complex for us to spot.

Dharma · 02-03-2005, 08:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paraprakrti

Screw hinduism. "Hinduism" is a product of kali yuga. Vedic teachings accomodate persons of various levels of realization. The impersonalists speculate that any personal form of the absolute truth is under Maya. According to Vedic literatures such as the Bhagavad-Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam that simply is not the fact. The Personality of Godhead is the most confidential of transcendental knowledge and God never falls under maya. The presumption that God falls under maya is ludicrous in more ways than 108.

Kalyug is the age when religion will be bastardized since men will be bastardized from their own true natures...i.e. God will be worshipped as other since men are so distant from their true natures, that God or the true self might as well be looked upon as other...

premjan · 02-03-2005, 09:23 AM

I think both of these are basically opposite distortions. God as other is basically either dualist mysticism or tribalism or good-evilism. God as self is basically monist mysticism. Krishna typifies this "I am God" fallacy. Jesus is a slightly safer version (I am the Son of God) but tends in the limit to the same problem.

Basically God is a zone of "false explanations". It represents the inflation of either the individual ego or the collective ego. In this sense, Buddhism is more accurate since it corrects the problem of ego at the root. If we ignore the conceptual aspects of Buddhism and emphasize the practical aspects, then it is a "true" religion.

The main problem with these formulations is the identification of the individual with an abstract and subtle entity (the mind or soul etc.) rather than a concrete and material entity (the body). The reason this is a problem is that any one person's cognization of the subtle and abstract is fundamentally limited, qualified and flawed.

Vajradhara · 02-03-2005, 12:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by perfectbite

I have often wondered why Buddhism took such a nosedive in Hindu Indian thought and belief.

Namaste perfectbite,

it can be fairly said that when the seat of Mahayana Buddhism was destroyed during the Muslim invasions, that effectively removed Buddhism from main stream Indian thought.

it didn't die out altogether in India, though, the forest tradition of the Eastern jungles was preserved as well as some of the Southern lineages.

in the Diaspora of the Tibetans, Mahayana Buddhism is making a strong come back in India these days.

02-03-2005, 12:52 AM	#35
premjan Obsessed Contributor Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: NJ Posts: 61,538	Gaia and mind I don't think Gaia is taken too seriously by evolutionists other than as a rather nondescriptive substitute for a totally reductive hypothesis (i.e. some sort of vague "holistic" pattern which we don't understand yet). If there really were a big mind pervading the universe, then information would be able to travel freely from one side of the universe to the other and we would see strange coincidences ("miracles" if you will) without clear cause and effect relationships. Unless mind is just a metaphor and then it is pretty useless for anything except as a belief.

02-03-2005, 02:17 AM	#36
perfectbite Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: N. California Posts: 3,127	ontologically basic Premjan, A philosophy professor of mine used to say that persons are ontologically basic. Perhaps Gaia is ontologically basic too so any limited investigation of Gaia's being could truly only be done by another of Gaia's mentality. It is a matter of scale. As far as info from the universal mind whizzing around the universe for us to intercept and ponder on you and Paraprakrti are talking about an ancient text a mere 5,000 years old. Dharma seems to think that humanity turned to science because the spiritual side of human nature was either so corrupted in its interpretation that it ceased making sense or that it was so distorted that it ceased being meaningful (six of one, half a dozen of the other) and science worth calling science has only really come into its own within in the last 3 or 4 hundred years and has only been truly useful to humanity for the last 2 hundred years (steam and electricity). For the size of the universe our whole species is as transient as a human blink. For some cosmic beings, a la Douglas Adams, (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Universe) saying the equivalent of 'Oops' could easily take 15 human generations. Basically we're just troubled and troublesome onlookers although a very few of us do get to peep through a hole in the fence and those few recognize that miracles happen every day for every one of us but they are so commonplace that they are not considered miracles. In the same way that the self proclaimed reincarnation of Sai Baba is referred to as 'Siddhi Sai Baba', because of his tricks, Dharma's 7 foot tall blonde tap dancing on water would quickly be named 'Siddhi Siegfried' and the novelty would not last. It could be that we are either fantastically lucky or we are destructive abberations.

02-03-2005, 02:27 AM	#37
premjan Obsessed Contributor Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: NJ Posts: 61,538	problem of scale I sort of doubt that we don't recognize Gaia simply due to vast scale (because we are capable of conceiving of the whole universe "all that is" as a single entity so our minds are pretty scale-insensitive), though complexity could be a problem. Perhaps there is a mind buried somewhere in the universe's details (like the devil) and the connections are so convoluted we just don't have the neurons to grok them yet. Of course some would view the "unreasonable effectiveness of science (e.g. physics)" as evidence for a global mind, but it might just be evidence of a common root cause (e.g. big bang). A "mind" (e.g. human mind) basically shows flexible information processing and symbolic thought. Since our minds do it, and we can tell other creatures that do it, and we can think in a scale-insensitive manner, we ought to be able to identify it in the universe, unless the pattern is simply to complex for us to spot.

02-03-2005, 09:23 AM	#39
premjan Obsessed Contributor Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: NJ Posts: 61,538	God as self or God as other I think both of these are basically opposite distortions. God as other is basically either dualist mysticism or tribalism or good-evilism. God as self is basically monist mysticism. Krishna typifies this "I am God" fallacy. Jesus is a slightly safer version (I am the Son of God) but tends in the limit to the same problem. Basically God is a zone of "false explanations". It represents the inflation of either the individual ego or the collective ego. In this sense, Buddhism is more accurate since it corrects the problem of ego at the root. If we ignore the conceptual aspects of Buddhism and emphasize the practical aspects, then it is a "true" religion. The main problem with these formulations is the identification of the individual with an abstract and subtle entity (the mind or soul etc.) rather than a concrete and material entity (the body). The reason this is a problem is that any one person's cognization of the subtle and abstract is fundamentally limited, qualified and flawed.

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02-02-2005, 05:56 PM	#31
perfectbite Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: N. California Posts: 3,127	Premjan, I have been giving some thought to the concept of Gaia and it seems that there are a number of ways of looking at the concept of Gaia. Two in particular are 1. that Gaia as a conscious entity involves itself (concepts this big must forsake mere gender) with the evolution of life on the planet as we know it but its time scales are far longer than ours and what is beautiful for us may not be beautiful for the arachnids or vice versa so there seems to be a great deal of anthropomorphism involved with our concept of Gaia and 2. In positing Gaia as a planetary entity manipulating forms of matter to an unknown beautiful or at least harmonious end, the assumption is made that Gaia is conscious but, for me, it is not a given that Gaia realizes or even could realize enlightenment because of its involvement with matter and the next intellectual step, which could be denied to Gaia but open to us humans (and I use the term humans loosely) would be the realization of Mind only. Going from the planetary to the cosmic as it were. That isn't much of an intellectual step but in taking that step matter then becomes an aspect of consciousness and does not have an independent existence apart from cosciousness. So, to answer your question: I do believe that Gaia or something like Gaia chooses life and that all earthly life benefits from Gaia's caring attention. However, perversely, humankind could destroy Gaia which would be matricide but humankind could not destroy Mind try as it might. The teeniest tiniest microbe tucked away in stasis on the most insignificant barren piece of space rock, far, far from Gaia's knowing on the other side of the galaxy or universe for that matter, has mind. Mind ain't going anywhere but up.

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