What is supernatural?

Hey JT and Crash,My analysis of supernatural would start with early experiences of unusual events and how people experienced or understood them. I think the concepts of natural and supernatural where in use long before science. If a two head calf was born for example that is so rare that it must have seemed like a "magical" event. Now science has explained many rare developemental defects. The same goes for certain events like lightning or strange clouds or winds. These these weren't day to day and so may have seemed supernatural. Also nature not being understood it was thought gods(s) controlled these things.Then humans began to use the scientific method to explore and explain the world. The question is is if anything is left that falls into an unexplained and clearly unnatural catagory?Western religions do seem to depend on something being supernatural as they claim that God is supernatural. I would like to suggest a third direction that of immanent and transcendent. Using the lake analogy with all the difficulties it possesses I would suggest that another mystery for fish might be water itself. Temperature, taste, smell, motion are all important but it's water that is so a part of a fish inside and out that it can't perceive it. Water here is a metaphor for consicousness. Instead of a supernatural god I am proposing god as consciousness and because that is how we know the universe we don't don't know it in itself. The eye sees everything but itself. This is a rough groping towards rather than a completed conjecture.If this is outside your intended thread, Crash, give me the word and I will say no more here.lfen

Ah well there might be ways at coming up with non supernaturalistic explaanations for the gospel miracles, though those might be unacceptable for a fundamentist approach. I don't know. The orthodox christian understanding of Jesus's divinity is not the only way to understand the statements along those lines in the gospels. Again the other ways would be "heretical" but I've been a heretic to so many things all my life that doesn't bother me personally.I don't believe the gospels are literal accounts anyway and am interested in the mythicist analysis of Paul's writing that claim Paul was writing about a spiritual person and not a historic individual.My brother believes Jesus was a historic teacher who was awakened and stories grew up around him after his death. There are incredible miracle stories about the birth, life and death of the Buddha but the nature of Buddhism doesn't require belief in them.The notion of an avatar or awakened being who has realized his oneness with God is another way to account for the divinity claims of Jesus, but I know that is an unnacceptable explanation for fundamentalist and most orthodox christians.Still the level of miracles in the gospels seems less taxing to explain than things like the sun standing still in the OT.lfen

What about our imagination. We create things in our imagination. We could create a frog that sings opera and jumps into space. Does our imagination have laws governing it? This is just a theoretical brainstorm question. Does imagination fit your requirements? Why or why not?lfen

Hey... I resemble that remark! Are you sure? You're a frog right? am amphibian, your body lives subject to the physical laws of the universe, but you? your thoughts, or opinions, I think they have a definite imaginary component. And I will put forth the notion that the 'ego' is imaginary.Now I'll guess each of you will object to this. JT won't want me cleverly saving his supernaturalness by pointing out that our imaginations interact with the world and we when we imagine supernatureal stuff it interacts with the world through our imaginations.And Crash has just insisted we live in the real world.But Shakesspeare? oh he would agree. lfen

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"So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there's bugger all down here on Earth." Monty Python's Galaxy Song

Oh, no, by "ego" I don't mean consciousness, rather consciousness is fundamental and it mistakenly identifies itself with an "idea" of who we are. The "identity" seems to be a separate body, a separate entity. This notion of who we are is what I am referring to as "ego". I'll return to this towards the end of this post. I am not using logic here but as you surmise poetic expression. I cite the Bard to illustrate by the evocativeness of his expression. But I have shifted approaches in this post. Yes, some significant amount of the world is something we imagine and I'm not sure we can always identify what is imagination and what we have experienced.Korzybski with his field of General Semantics said, " the map is not the territory". Think about science, about electromagnetic radiation, sound, atoms, and molecules. A photon enters our eye and is absorded by a molecule in a nerve cell thus altering the shape of the molecule resulting in changes along it's length that result at the end of a release of a neurotransmitter. A whole bunch of photons and we see the familiar world. Do we see that world as it is? No, we see it as our organism constructs it.What do we know of ourself? Memory can have inaccurracy. Our feelings change. We think we are such and such and yet sometimes we feel and do things that don't seem to be ourself, what we think we are is something that is thought.I am very poorly expressing a philosophical point of view that I am still struggling with.I am saying that we imagine the supernatural as well as the natural yes. Physicists don't know what gravity is. We know the phenomena of gravity works and using math we can predict a bunch of stuff, design buildings, rockets, etc. We use gravity and we experience it with our bodies without knowing what it is, only that it is.I'm not offering a final or absolute truth here, just brainstorming into the possibilities of imagination.I tend to identify this with eastern nondual thought and yet Shakespeare expesses it so well. Consciousness knows things and then thinks it is those things, but can IT be that which is an object to IT?Can IT be the body or feelings or opinions or knowledge that IT is aware of? The illusion is that consciousness takes itself to be the objects it's aware of. That is the "stuff that dreams are made on" this identity. Shakespeare saw that theater offered an analogy to the world. As actors brought characters to life on the stage, so consciousness brings characters to life in the world.I don't know what mind, imagination, or consciousness is and yet I think that is probably what I am.But if the supernatural were an aspect of imagination it could be present for us in our world without interfering with phenomena like gravity. So it seems it would satisfy in some sense your desire that there be a supernatural and crashfrog's desire to preserve the integrity of the "physical" universe.When I started to think about it I realize that I scarcely know what imagination is. It seems powerful and significant but hard for me to know where it begins or leaves off.lfen

I think we live in two worlds and we may be a lot more familiar with the world we construct in our imagination than the real world.The brain's imaginative function can impact the immune system and I think that is often the source of miraculous faith healing.The phenomena of gravity, falling, how things are arranged on the earth I'll call the real world. But much of our human interactions, behaviours, affliations have strong imaginary components. Conflicts are often because two individuals or groups have differently imagined a situation. And I think we don't know what we "are, but only what we imagine ourselves to "be".lfen

Crash, do you have free will in your imagination? I sometimes awaken and recall a dream that it so unlike what I might do or feel in my waking life. The question of who we are is not trivial. The conscious deliberate ego is only part of the total organism and has limited control. Are we the deliberate ego? the body/brain? consciousness?lfen

I'm saying more than that. We actually create a lot of the reality we experience. We use sense input but we don't just filter it we add to it.What do you mean by spirt? Is that a synonym for God, for consciousness, or are you introducing another concept here and if so do we need it?We got God, consciousness, supernatural, imagination and illusion. Do we need spirit?lfen

I don't KNOOOOOOO! I've never SEEN the matrix! It amuses me to tell people that God killed my tv and set me free. I guess I'm kind of a closet deist? Well, anyway my tv died, and I love not having that distracting noise around and it does feel freer.I've less and less interest in fiction and hardly read or watch it anymore. Humans, souls, consciousness sounds like you have a trinitarian view of people? Consciousness a fundamental part of God and then if we are conscious does it follow we are a fundamental part of God? You are getting very close to the nondual viewpoint here. Just to let ya know.lfen

Okay, so what is human and what is soul how do they differ? Ok, property instead of part. Does it then follow that if consciousness is a fundamental property of God and souls have consciousness are souls a fundamental property of God?lfen

crash,I think we are on topic but then I'm the one who introduced this line of speculation. I'm suggesting there might be a way for science to account for the supernatural if what is supernatural is an agency operating through the human imagination. I admitted that definition would most likely not be acceptable to tradtional religious conceptions of supernatural and I'm exploring this as we go.The traditional idea about supernatural is something that effects the world out there. And if that is the case I think there is little to add to your OP. As consciousness is the most blatant mystery left to science, it has barely been addressed, I am thinking that if there is a manifestation of something supernatural that consciousness is the place that it could occur without breaking scientific laws.It's an arcane exploration but I will defend it on the grounds of otherwise there is little to add to your opening argument and this line of inquiry might open up some heretofore unglimpsed possibilities.And must we have free will? I'm thinking we might be conditioned organisms.Just my opinion and it's your topic.lfen

Agreed. But would you say that it is possible to say that there is less free will than had once been thought? Or to put it another way conditioning limits the arena that free will could operate in?I'm thinking of the study Damasio cited in his book:The feeling of what happens : body and emotion in the making of consciousnessWhere the initiation of a muscle response to make a choice occurs before the individual reports making a choice and suggests that if we have free will it would be more in the area of inhibiting an impulse that is underway rather than in choosing to do something.lfen

Phat,I'm thinking you mean conceived? I know it was said he was born in a manger but is there any information on his birth? I had assumed a natural vaginal delivery but I could have missed something.Recall how Shakespeare had MacBeth feel invulnerable since "no man born of woman" could topple him, and then it turn's out the MacDuff was born by c-section. "Spirit" remains an undefined term. It has many meanings in the area of emotional vitality and psychological manifestations as well as feelings people have about experiences they might term supernatural all the way from creepy ghost feelings to sublime mystical visions. But talking about the natural world we have physics. Each of us posting to this forum has periods of sleep and periods when we know we are awake and conscious. So there is consciousness which though little understood is a feature of our experience of this universe.But apart from human experiences what do you mean by spirit?lfen

Jar, Crash, and others in this discussion,This dilemma in part motivates my interest in the nondual approaches of the east as in Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta which was heavily influenced by Buddhism.The Buddha did not use supernatural approaches to his insight. He used a subjective approach of examining the contents and function of his stream of consciousness.I understand the appeal of the notion of consciousness as an emergent property. The nondual approach however sees consciousness as the substrate in a sense of the energy/matter space/time universe. This is the fertile Void of Zen, or the source or Godhead of Brahman in Hinduism, the Godhead in the thought of some Christian mystics.It is not supernatural, yet it is neither matter, energy, space, or time. Well, the favorite sutra in Zen puts it "form is emptiness, emptiness is form".But this approach differs from the Judeo Christian Muslim notion that God created the universe out of nothing as something separate from Itself. Science then studies matter/energy space/time as separate from consciousness, yet without consciousness there would be no science.I am not offering a solution. I am saying that I find this the most promising direction of exploration. The supernatural to me is mystery with a small m, The Amazing Randi guy studies it very successfully I think. Consciousness to me is the most important Mystery. Something so intimate that it can be said to be us. Edwin Schroedinger said "consciousness is a singular for which there is no plural"[edit: I've got to find the exact quote, this is a paraphrase from memory]Consciousness is not supernatural, maybe call it sub natural as in the Tibetan concept of the Ground Awareness, the source. Rather than the Sky God metaphor of supernatural, I prefer the notion of Lao Tzu where he says "the Tao gives birth to the ten thousand things". A maternal metaphor rather then the Judeo Christian paternal metaphor. It is not something outside of or above, it's something that we are in and it is within us, it is us, the universe.lfenThis message has been edited by lfen, 09-12-2004 10:42 PM