scholarly journals COVID: GOD’S GREAT BLESSINGS

Author(s):  
Osmar Pogoy Labajo

Why are people worried and afraid of COVID? Why does the world consider this pandemic as a devastating crisis? Sad to say, the deep surface of its ultimate reality is not clearly seen by the reflective naked eyes by many.

Author(s):  
Sibajiban Bhattacharyya

In the Ṛg Veda, the oldest text in India, many gods and goddesses are mentioned by name; most of them appear to be deifications of natural powers, such as fire, water, rivers, wind, the sun, dusk and dawn. The Mīmāṃsā school started by Jaimini (c.ad 50) adopts a nominalistic interpretation of the Vedas. There are words like ‘Indra’, ‘Varuṇa’, and so on, which are names of gods, but there is no god over and above the names. God is the sacred word (mantra) which has the potency to produce magical results. The Yoga system of Patañjali (c.ad 300) postulates God as a soul different from individual souls in that God does not have any blemishes and is eternally free. The ultimate aim of life is not to realize God, but to realize the nature of one’s own soul. God-realization may help some individuals to attain self-realization, but it is not compulsory to believe in God to attain the summum bonum of human life. Śaṅkara (c.ad 780), who propounded the Advaita Vedānta school of Indian philosophy, agrees that God-realization is not the ultimate aim of human life. Plurality, and therefore this world, are mere appearances, and God, as the creator of the world, is himself relative to the concept of the world. Rāmānuja (traditionally 1016–1137), the propounder of the Viśiṣṭādvaita school, holds God to be ultimate reality, and God-realization to be the ultimate goal of human life. The way to realize God is through total self-surrender to God. Nyāya theory also postulates one God who is an infinite soul, a Person with omniscience and omnipresence as his attributes. God is the creator of language, the author of the sacred Vedas, and the first teacher of all the arts and crafts.


Author(s):  
Andrey Bragin

The article is devoted to problem of revision of the borders of the range (the phase volume) and adequacy of the perception of the world in speaker long disheveled locks of universe-social evolution of the man. It is shown that in man’s perception volume is conditioned by the physiological organization as well as by its place in the cosmos and the Earth biosphere. The accent is made on discovery determinant conditioning given range of the perception and facility of the expression available perception to information. It is revealed that the modeling of reality becomes more abstract and clear, but less concrete, adequate to the «ultimate reality» with its blurred forms.


Numen ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Jacobsen

AbstractThe dualism of the consciousness principle (puruṣa) and the material principle (Prakrti) in the Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya (Yoga) traditions of religious thought has often been thought of as a dualism of a male and a female principle. Contrary to what is often assumed however the material principle of Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya does not possess a female identity. This paper argues that the identification of the Sāmkhya and Pātañjala-Sāmkhya Prakrti with a female principle among scholars is due to a very selective use of evidence and too much dependence on later sources, especially the Tantric religious systems in which the female-male polarity was utilized for the interpretation of the ultimate reality, the structure of the world and the means to attain liberation. The way the Tantric religions utilized the Sāmkhya dualism of Prakrti and puruṣa to illustrate the female-male polarity of ultimate reality illustrates the manner in which the Tantric religions reinterpreted elements of earlier systems of religious thought and transformed them according to their own purpose and the process of borrowing and synthesizing of what had come before them typical of the Hindu religious traditions.


Author(s):  
Thomas Baldwin

McTaggart was one of the last of the ‘British Idealists’, the group of British philosophers, such as B. Bosanquet and F.H. Bradley, who took their inspiration from Hegel. In his early writings from the 1890s, McTaggart gave a critical exposition of themes from Hegel’s logic before advancing his own distinctive idealist positions concerning time, the mind, and reality in general. But in his writings from 1910 he developed an independent account of the structure of existence from which he then argued for the same idealist positions as before. The thesis for which McTaggart is now most famous is that of the unreality of time; what is even more difficult to come to terms with is his thesis that the ultimate reality of the world comprises a community of selves wholly constituted by their loving perceptions of each other. This thesis is a manifestation of a mysticism that is an essential element in McTaggart’s philosophy; yet this mysticism is combined with a rationalist determination, reminiscent of Spinoza, to vindicate mystical insights by the light of pure reason alone.


Metalepsis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Duncan Kennedy

This chapter examines the narratological concept of metalepsis in relation to metaphysical texts, investigating how competing metaphysical assumptions affect the ways in which metalepsis is thought to operate in relation to empirical experience. It takes as a major point of reference Christopher Nolan’s 2010 movie Inception, in which three distinct narrative levels are troped as dreams within dreams. The film’s closing scene raises and leaves unanswered the question whether the level inhabited at that point by the central character is his ‘reality’ (as he believes) or whether he is still within a dream. For many people who inhabit the world of empirical experience, that world is not ultimate ‘reality’, which lies at one level removed. As examples of this attitude in texts concerned with metaphysics, the chapter explores Fate in Virgil’s Aeneid and the apostrophized God in Augustine’s Confessions before focusing on the Platonic appeal to the world of the Forms. In the emergence of a ‘classical’ metaphysics of an ultimate reality lying beyond time, change, and narrative, however, the key ancient figure is Parmenides; but ancient texts that embrace those very features, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, already point to the ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics which has come to the fore in the wake of Heidegger’s Being and Time and has recently achieved remarkable prominence. The conclusion of the chapter explores how, within such a ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics, the narrative frames by which we order and project our empirical experience break in on each other as they establish what we accept as our ‘reality’.


Author(s):  
Merold Westphal

This chapter distinguishes three modes of immanence and transcendence with reference to God: cosmological, epistemic, and ethical. Immanence affirms, while transcendence denies that God is contained within the world, and thus within the limits of human reason, or within the norms and resources of human society and culture. Hegel serves as the model of immanence within the nineteenth century. He affirms that spirit is the ultimate reality, and it turns out that he means the human spirit in its social constructions, its cultural self-understanding, and its historical unfolding. We can call this a humanistic pantheism. Kierkegaard develops the model of transcendence in the form of a personalist theism. God is personal as an agent (not merely a force or cause) and a performer of speech acts. As such God is a reality independent of and transcendent to human life in all its forms.


Philosophy ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 7 (26) ◽  
pp. 129-137
Author(s):  
W. R. Inge

Philosophy is keenly interested in the new cosmological theories. For, whatever view we take of the nature of ultimate reality, the world in space and time is an appearance of that reality, and must bear some relation to it. That the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin have deeply influenced both philosophy and religion is universally admitted. Many think that Einstein and his colleagues may produce a revolution not less momentous.


Philosophy ◽  
1944 ◽  
Vol 19 (73) ◽  
pp. 117-129
Author(s):  
T. A. Burkill

Theism is sometimes defined by reference to the contrasted doctrines of Deism and Pantheism. Deism, it is said, lays stress on God's transcendence, while Pantheism emphasizes his immanence to the exclusion of his transcendence. Theism, on the other hand, mediates between these two one-sided doctrines and affirms that God is at once both immanent and transcendent. He is in the world and yet beyond it. This definition, however, can only be accepted with qualification because some forms of Pantheism are arrived at by stressing, not the immanence, but the transcendence of God. According to Neo-Platonism, for example, the ineffable Absolute is so transcendent in existence and value that the world is reduced to the humble status of a mere illusory appearance and all veritable reality is absorbed in the Divine. This complication of the matter means that when studying the nature of Theism it is necessary to consider the opposition between Cosmism and Acosmism as well as that between transcendence and immanence The cosmistic tendency is to affirm, whereas the acosmistic tendency is to deny, the ultimate reality of the finite individual's effective autonomy. Theism is cosmistic, in the sense that it refuses to reduce the finite individual to a mere dependent mode of God. Nevertheless, the acosmistic tendency is very evident in many so-called theistic systems—so much so in some cases, indeed, that what is alleged to be Theism really amounts to Pantheism in disguise.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document