Tag: Mind
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A Down-to-Earth look at God (ii)
Following on from my previous post, I’m exploring what can, reasonably and credibly, be said about God. Many people may have the science versus religion debate, (occasionally acrimonious and mud-slinging), in the background, if not foreground, of their thinking. On the one hand, there are the ‘new atheists’ who don’t just claim that religion poisons […]
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Common sense? V
After four posts suggesting that ‘common sense’ can be deceiving, I want to conclude this series by suggesting an area in which ‘common sense’ may be spot on. One of today’s most obstinate mysteries is the origin and nature of consciousness, especially in the form of self-awareness. We humans, at present, are the most advanced […]
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Common Sense? I
Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) is famous, or infamous, for arguing that esse est percipi – “to be is to be perceived”. What we humans experience as material objects exist solely in our perceptions of them. In other words, there are no material objects as such, but only minds (human and divine) containing mental ‘representations’. Hence […]
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Difficulty and ‘Religion’ and ‘God’
Since I live now in my seventy-seventh year, I’ve an excuse for trying to tidy up loose ends, tie threads together, and summarise where I’m ‘at’. Please note, however, that as a believer in life-long learning, I may not be ‘at’ the same place tomorrow, and also that I write, not expecting anyone to share […]
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Do We Possess a Soul?
The concept of a “soul” comes to us, in our Western part of the world, from Greek Philosophy and from Judaism and Christianity. In Greek Philosophy, the key word is psuche. Its root meaning is located in the experience of breathing, and so it’s associated with life. Whatever lives breathes; whatever dies doesn’t. Putting these […]
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Consciousness, Mind and Whirlpools
My previous post was about Panpsychism, a long held, newly resurgent view of mind, consciousness or awareness. Consciousness, I suggested, should neither be regarded as an illusion, nor as miraculously ’emerging’ from unconscious matter. Rather, it should be viewed as ‘built in’ with the bricks of the universe – a ‘given’, like photons, electrons and […]
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Where does Consciousness come from?
Materialism continues to be the view of ‘how things are’ for a great many people. They see themselves as material beings who live in a world of material things which obey the laws of physics, and can be weighed and measured. They seem to forget that there are ‘things’ that aren’t things. There are thoughts […]
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Appearance, Reality, and William Blake (pt.1)
In a poem entitled ‘The Everlasting Gospel‘, William Blake wrote, In his ‘Auguries of Innocence‘, however, when we do look “thro’ the Eye”, this enables us, In this first of two posts, let’s look at the lines from “The Everlasting Gospel“. The “five windows of the soul” are the five senses which give us information […]
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Believing in God
Do I believe in God? This question is perhaps next door to meaningless and therefore unanswerable. There are probably as many meanings for the word God, as there are people in the world. Let’s start with the fact that God is a three-letter word. Grammatically, it’s a noun and, in my schooldays at any rate, […]
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Ground of all Being
The philosopher of religion, Paul Tillich, imagined God, not as “a being” but as “being-itself or the ground of all being”, the ultimate Source of all that is, which is beyond the reach of human minds and words to comprehend or describe. Modern Science imagines a universal, multilayered Energy Field, intangible and invisible, out of […]
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