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Originally Posted by Vinterland  Quote:
Originally Posted by marmalade I agree that a personal monotheistic God would seem to necessitate the trait of being all-powerful. I assume we're limiting ourselves to that type of God in this discussion, yes? Because if we're speaking about a more impersonal mystical Godhead, then its a whole different ballgame. | There are no limits to this discussion!  As for this 'Godhead', please do explain. |
Let me first give you my take on 'God' as a word. 'God' implies many meanings often overlapping eachother: highest principle, universal law, inherent truth, core self, ultimate reality, ruler of the universe, creator, savior of mankind, wayshower, friend to all, longing for the beloved(Sufism), life force/anima mundi, Lila(creative play), The Word, necessary premise, source of all, monotheism, monism, nondualism, various pan- isms, and an endless variety of mystical experiences.
All of these can be stated as ideas, but all of these have also been directly experienced by people. You can dismiss the experiences as hallucinations or cultural expectations, but that wouldn't be helpful. As I've said before, the experiences are like any beginning premise in a logical argument. If you've experienced them, then they seem like reasonable premises. If you haven't then, they seem meaningless.
However, these experiences are also hypotheses that can be tested. And they have been tested by practitioners for thousands of years. If you want to see the complexity of this, then look into Hinduism where they've gone into greate detail.
When I said Godhead, I was using it in an extremely general sense. I was centrally meaning it as mystical experience, but the Godhead is also a theological idea that can be argued about. The problem is that the idea and the various experiences attributed to the idea aren't the same thing. This is the issue of interpretation of experience.
Besides, most religious people admit that God is a paradox, that God isn't limited to logic nor that logic is even the best way to know and understand God. The experience of God is an non-rational experience which isn't the same thing as irrational.
There are some things that simply are outside of logic. You can accept them or you can deny them. If you accept them, then they can be used as a premise for a logical argument... but premises themselves need not be logical.
As we're limiting ourselves to logic here, nothing more can be said unless we agree on the premises. However, to take experiences of God or Godhead as a premise we'd have to refer to various mystical traditions and the complex details of their philosophies.
I'm no expert in this area. But if you want to explore the best attempt to explain such things, then a good website is kheper.net. There is a lot of info there, and it would take years of study to begin to understand it. Its related to other integral theories. Integral is an attempt to integrate the various facets of human knowledge including spirituality.
Here is one definition of Godhead from that site:
http://www.kheper.net/realities/realities/godhead.htm Quote:
The Inner Divine Godhead
Beyond the Augoeides or inner Divine nature are further hypostases of the Godhead and the Absolute. Three can be mentioned in order from more to less manifest:
(1) The Innermost Godhead, the source of Love, Joy, and Guidance in manifest existence, with which the Higher Self relates on an "I-Thou" basis. This is generally referred to as "God" or "Lord" in the various religions, and especially the mystical path of those religions, as the exoteric religion gets stuck on a much lower level.
(2) Within the Absolute of Infinite Truth, the emanation of the Higher Selves appear as Transcendent, Eternal Divine Individualities - the "Divine Names" or "Names in the Mind of God" of Medieval Christian and Sufi theology - each embodying its own unique Higher Truth. Hence we have the Eternal Higher Self as opposed to the evolving Higher Self.
(3) Finally, the Absolute of Infinite Bliss constitutes the original Absolute, from which all other subsequent realities in this series arise.
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I don't know how any of this fits into the original post of this thread. And I certainly don't know what all of this means.
Logic is useful, but having a personal practice such as meditation is as or more useful. If you want to know what religious people are talking about, then the only way to find out is to explore it for yourself. In Buddhism, its suggested that you should take nothing on faith and should always test all truth claims. In Buddhism, you need not believe in a god, but 'Enlightenment' is basically no different than what many people mean by the word 'God'
I'll add that even atheists such as Harris reommend mystical experiences as being valid ways to explore what it means to be human and to experience reality as a human.