Någon har tagit en pisspaus på Carolina Rediviva. Allvarligt talat, jag är "pro-arkiv" så killen som gjorde det här borde hängas upp och ner någonstans. Offras?
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Narabali (part 2)
More on Hinduism and human sacrifice. Source: ChatGPT.
Go one step deeper and give me 5–10 specific alleged cases from ancient and medieval India with dates, rulers/temples, original sources, and historical credibility.
Yes. I dug into this more carefully, and the picture is actually more interesting—and more uncertain—than the usual popular accounts suggest.
One correction to my previous answer is important: some famous claims about particular temples (especially Tanjore, Kalighat, and Danteshwari) are repeated endlessly in secondary literature, but when you trace them back, the evidence can become surprisingly thin. So below I distinguish documented practice, contemporary literary evidence, textual prescription, and later allegation/legend.
1. The Puruṣamedha — Vedic period, probably 1st millennium BCE
Location: North India / Vedic ritual culture
Date: roughly late 2nd–1st millennium BCE for the relevant Brāhmaṇa literature
Deity/ritual: the Puruṣamedha, "human sacrifice"
Primary sources: Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 13.6.2; Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa; Śrauta Sūtras
This is the most important ancient textual case. The ritual texts describe human beings being selected and assigned to sacrificial roles alongside animals and other victims.
But there is a crucial twist: the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa describes the human victims being released. Consequently, the strongest interpretation today is that the ritual had become symbolic rather than an actual killing.
There is a long-standing scholarly debate about whether the rite originated from an actual human sacrifice that was subsequently transformed into a harmless ritual. Older scholars such as Rajendralala Mitra argued for an originally genuine human sacrifice; modern scholarship is considerably more cautious.
Assessment:
🟢 Human sacrifice as a ritual concept: certain.
🟡 Actual human killing: unproven.
2. Śunaḥśepa — Vedic period
Date: probably 1st millennium BCE literary preservation
Source: Aitareya Brāhmaṇa 7.13–18; later versions in the Rāmāyaṇa
King Hariścandra promises Varuṇa that he will sacrifice his son. When the son refuses, Śunaḥśepa is purchased as a substitute victim.
He is taken to the sacrificial ground and bound to the sacrificial posts. He then recites hymns to the gods and is miraculously released.
This is not evidence that the historical event actually happened. But it is extremely valuable evidence for the conceptual world of Vedic religion: human beings could be conceived as sacrificial victims, and the narrative makes the rescue of the human victim the dramatic resolution.
In other words, it is evidence for the possibility and imagination of human sacrifice, rather than evidence for a particular historical killing.
Assessment:
🟢 Very strong evidence for the existence of human-sacrifice concepts.
🔴 Not evidence that Śunaḥśepa was historically sacrificed.
3. The Mālatīmādhava — 8th century CE
This is considerably more interesting because we have a datable Indian literary work depicting an apparently contemporary religious environment.
Date: c. 700–750 CE
Author: Bhavabhūti
Location: fictionalized Padmāvatī, but reflecting North Indian religious culture
Shrine: a terrifying goddess shrine associated with a Kāpālika ascetic
In Act V, the heroine Mālatī is abducted for sacrifice by the Kāpālika Aghoraghaṇṭa, who intends to offer her to Cāmuṇḍā/Karālā.
The Kāpālika cult depicted by Bhavabhūti is associated with cremation-ground imagery, skulls, blood and transgressive Śaiva practice. Bhavabhūti was writing in the 8th century, and the play is consequently an important early literary witness to the reputation and perceived practices of Kāpālikas.
But there's a major caveat:
It's a drama.
The villain is deliberately horrifying. We cannot simply take Bhavabhūti's plot as an ethnographic report saying "Kāpālikas regularly sacrificed people."
Nevertheless, it is significant that human sacrifice was sufficiently recognizable as a religious motif for Bhavabhūti to use it in this context.
Assessment:
🟡 Strong evidence that human sacrifice was associated with certain fierce Śākta/Śaiva cults in the cultural imagination of 8th-century India.
🟡 Possible reflection of real practice, but not proof of routine Kāpālika sacrifice.
4. Candamārī and the Yaśastilaka — c. 959 CE
This is probably my favorite medieval textual example, because it is more elaborate than Mālatīmādhava.
Date: c. 959 CE
Author: Somadeva Sūri, a Jain author
Text: Yaśastilaka
Location: fictional Rajapura
Deity: Candamārī, identified with Cāṇḍikā
Temple: a shrine called Mahābhairava
The story describes King Māradaṭṭa being persuaded to conduct a magical sacrifice in order to obtain a supernatural sword. The intended sacrifice involves animals and human beings.
The description is extraordinarily gruesome: human victims are brought to the temple and guarded alongside large numbers of animals awaiting slaughter.
What makes this particularly valuable is that Somadeva is not a Hindu propagandist. He was a Jain author presenting a dramatic critique of non-Jain religious practices.
K.K. Handiqui's study of the work explicitly notes that the Candamārī cult is presented as involving human sacrifice, while also cautioning that some of the description is fantastic.
Assessment:
🟡 Very good evidence that the idea/practice of human sacrifice to fierce goddesses was culturally plausible in 10th-century India.
🟡 Actual frequency remains uncertain.
5. The Kālikā Purāṇa — Assam/Kāmarūpa, c. 10th–11th century
This is probably the strongest textual evidence for explicitly sanctioned human sacrifice in medieval Hinduism.
Date: probably 10th–11th century
Region: Kāmarūpa/Assam
Text: Kālikā Purāṇa
Section: Rudhirādhyāya ("Chapter of Blood")
Deities: especially Kāmākhyā, Cāṇḍikā and Bhairava
The text doesn't merely mention human sacrifice. It gives a ritual framework in which a human victim can be offered.
The text is unusually specific about the victim, ritual eligibility and the circumstances under which the sacrifice is permissible. It even describes the victim as being ritually identified with the gods before being killed.
A contemporary scholarly discussion of Assam quotes the Rudhirādhyāya as prescribing the decapitation of a human victim and offering the head to the goddess.
However, there's an important qualification: the Kālikā Purāṇa is a prescriptive religious text, not a police report. It proves that a Hindu Śākta tradition could legitimize and ritualize the idea of human sacrifice; it doesn't by itself establish how often actual sacrifices occurred at Kāmākhyā.
Assessment:
🟢 Very strong evidence for a medieval Hindu textual tradition explicitly permitting human sacrifice.
🟡 Does not by itself prove routine sacrifices at the Kāmākhyā temple.
6. Assam and the Kāmākhyā tradition — medieval to early modern
This is where things become especially difficult.
There are longstanding accounts that human sacrifice occurred among several groups in Assam, including the Koch, Kachari, Chutiya, Tripuri and Jaintia peoples. Edward Gait's historical discussion specifically connects some of these practices with the ritual system represented by the Kālikā Purāṇa.
The connection with Kāmākhyā is particularly plausible because the Kālikā Purāṇa explicitly identifies Kāmākhyā among the deities who can receive human victims.
But we should not leap from that to "the Kāmākhyā temple regularly sacrificed humans."
The evidence establishes:
Kāmākhyā-centered Śākta theology → human sacrifice was conceivable and ritually elaborated.
It does not establish:
Kāmākhyā temple → routine historical human sacrifice.
That's a much stronger claim and needs independent evidence.
Assessment:
🟢 Strong evidence for human-sacrifice traditions in historical Assam.
🟡 Specific claims about the Kāmākhyā temple itself are less secure.
7. The Danteshwari/Bastar tradition — allegedly early 19th century
This is one of the most famous stories—and one of the most problematic.
Location: Bastar, Chhattisgarh
Deity: Danteshwari
Alleged date: around 1830
Ruler: the Bastar raja
Alleged event: 25 men sacrificed at the goddess's shrine
You'll find the claim repeated in numerous books: a Bastar ruler supposedly offered 25 human victims to Danteshwari in approximately 1830.
But historian Radhika Singha has examined the colonial evidence surrounding the Danteshwari accusations and the broader politics of the British campaign against "human sacrifice." The archival record is considerably more complicated than the popular story suggests. British officials interpreted alleged sacrifice as a royal practice involving kidnappings and offerings to the king's tutelary goddess.
This is a textbook example of why I wouldn't simply reproduce the "25 men" claim as historical fact.
Assessment:
🟡 There is genuine historical evidence of colonial allegations and investigations concerning human sacrifice in Bastar.
🔴 The famous "25 men in 1830" story is not sufficiently secure to present as established fact.
8. The Khond/Kandha Meriah sacrifices — 1830s–1860s
This technically falls outside "ancient/medieval," but it's too important to omit because it is probably our best historical documentation of actual human sacrifice in India.
Region: Odisha
People: Kandha/Khond
Victim: Meriah
Purpose: especially fertility/agricultural prosperity
Period of documentation: 1830s onward
British officials collected extensive evidence concerning Meriah victims. The sacrifice appears to have been integrated into local political structures, with local rulers and chiefs sometimes involved and specialist networks supplying victims.
A recent scholarly study in Comparative Studies in Society and History notes that a 1837 colonial report already describes the sacrifice as organized through local political units and discusses the role of rajas, patras and the people who supplied victims.
But again, historians have become much more critical of the old colonial narrative. The British had strong political reasons for representing the practice as widespread and barbaric, and some victims may have been captives or bonded people rather than the stereotypical "purely religious volunteers" of older accounts.
Assessment:
🟢 Very strong evidence that actual ritual killing occurred.
🟡 Its scale, frequency and exact religious meaning remain debated.
Two famous cases I'd actually downgrade
There are two claims you will encounter constantly that I wouldn't put in the same evidentiary category.
"Children were sacrificed every Friday at the Brihadisvara temple at Tanjore"
This appears in later popular literature, sometimes attributed to Joseph Campbell. The claim is that children were sacrificed before a goddess at the great Chola temple.
I cannot find adequate primary evidence for it.
Verdict: 🔴 unsubstantiated.
It should not be repeated as an established fact simply because it appears in books about Hinduism.
"Twenty-five people were sacrificed at Danteshwari in 1830"
As above, there is a real colonial record of allegations concerning Danteshwari and human sacrifice, but the specific dramatic number and date are not sufficiently secure.
Verdict: 🟡 alleged, not established.
What I think the evidence actually tells us
The really interesting pattern is that the evidence becomes stronger if we move through four levels:
| Evidence | Example | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| Myth/ritual text | Puruṣamedha | 🟢 certain as text |
| Religious prescription | Kālikā Purāṇa | 🟢 certain |
| Contemporary literary depiction | Mālatīmādhava, Yaśastilaka | 🟢 genuine historical evidence for the cultural phenomenon; 🟡 actual practice |
| Administrative/forensic documentation | Khond Meriah | 🟢 actual practice |
And there's an important chronological progression:
Vedic period
→ human sacrifice appears as a ritual concept, but is progressively symbolized/substituted
Early medieval period
→ literature depicts human sacrifice in fierce goddess and Kāpālika contexts
10th–11th century
→ the Kālikā Purāṇa provides an explicit ritual theology of human sacrifice
Later medieval/early modern period
→ reports of localized practices become more concrete, especially in Assam and eastern/central India
19th century
→ colonial authorities document and suppress actual practices such as Meriah
That is a much more defensible history than either "Hindus never practiced human sacrifice" or "human sacrifice was widespread throughout Hindu India."
And given our preceding discussion of Bhairava, Aghori and Tantra, there's one especially striking detail: the Yaśastilaka actually calls the Candamārī shrine Mahābhairava, while the Kālikā Purāṇa places human sacrifice within the same broad religious universe of Cāṇḍikā/Kālī/Bhairava worship.
That doesn't mean that Bhairava worship = human sacrifice—far from it—but it does show that the terrible/transgressive side of medieval Śaiva-Śākta religion wasn't merely a modern Western projection. Some of its most extreme ritual possibilities really are present in the Indian sources.
Narabali (part 1)
So I asked ChatGPT a somewhat contentious question...
Is there any evidence for human sacrifice in India?
Yes. There is credible evidence that human sacrifice occurred in parts of the Indian subcontinent, both in ancient textual traditions and, much more securely, in some later historical and modern cases. But the evidence is uneven, and it would be misleading to portray human sacrifice as a normal or widespread feature of Hinduism.
There are really three different questions here: what the Sanskrit texts describe, what people actually did historically, and what happened in relatively recent India.
1. The Vedic evidence is complicated
The most famous case is the Puruṣamedha ("human sacrifice"). Vedic ritual texts describe a ceremony in which human beings are symbolically assigned to sacrificial stakes along with various other victims.
However, the crucial question is whether the people were actually killed.
In the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, the ritual culminates in the release of the human victims. Consequently, many scholars interpret the Puruṣamedha as a symbolic or substituted sacrifice, rather than evidence that Vedic priests routinely killed people.
There is also the famous story of Śunaḥśepa, who is bound as a sacrificial victim but is saved through prayer. The story is found in Vedic material and later versions, including the Rāmāyaṇa.
So:
Vedic texts → definitely contain the concept and ritual symbolism of human sacrifice.
Vedic texts → do not give us equally strong evidence that actual human beings were routinely killed in these rituals.
That's an important distinction.
2. Later Hindu traditions provide stronger evidence
The situation becomes more interesting in later Śākta and Tantric literature.
There are traditions concerning narabali/narabali ("human offering/sacrifice"), particularly associated in some contexts with fierce forms of the Goddess and certain local deity traditions.
Texts sometimes prescribe human sacrifice or discuss circumstances in which it might be appropriate. But again, a prescription in a religious text isn't automatically evidence that the prescribed ritual was actually performed.
And Hinduism is enormously diverse. A text associated with one particular Tantric tradition tells us very little about what ordinary Vaiṣṇavas, Śaivas or Śāktas actually did.
3. There is historical evidence for actual practice
This is where the answer becomes a fairly unambiguous yes.
Historical accounts from different parts of India describe ritual killings associated with local gods, goddesses, kingship, warfare, construction and other circumstances. The problem is that some older European accounts are sensationalized and need to be treated cautiously.
There is also a long-standing Indian tradition of animal sacrifice, and human sacrifice appears at the extreme end of some of these sacrificial ideologies.
4. And narabali has occurred in modern India
This isn't merely an ancient phenomenon.
Modern forensic literature documents actual cases of ritual human killing in India. For example, a 2023 case report in Medicine, Science and the Law describes a contemporary case of narabali, explicitly distinguishing it from ordinary murder motivated by other circumstances.
A 2026 forensic review likewise discusses contemporary Indian cases, including a reported 2018 case in Telangana involving the ritual killing of a child.
These are criminal acts, not representative of mainstream Hindu religious practice.
5. What about Kālī?
This is where Western accounts have historically gone particularly wrong.
There really are traditions in which Kālī or other fierce goddesses are associated with blood sacrifice. But the stereotypical image of "Hindus worshipping Kali by sacrificing humans" is vastly exaggerated.
The overwhelmingly normal sacrificial offering, where blood sacrifice is practiced at all, is an animal, especially a goat or buffalo, or in many traditions no animal at all.
And there is a fascinating theological reason why the Goddess can be associated with terrifying sacrifice without requiring human sacrifice.
Kālī is the power that consumes death itself. The sacrifice can therefore become a symbolic offering of the practitioner's own ego, life-force, desires, or limitations.
This is especially relevant to your recent questions about Bhairava and Aghori traditions. The cremation ground, skulls, blood and sacrificial imagery don't necessarily imply that practitioners are literally killing people. Much of the symbolism concerns death, impermanence, ego-dissolution and the transcendence of purity/impurity distinctions.
6. So how strong is the evidence?
I'd rank it approximately like this:
| Claim | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Human sacrifice occurs in Indian religious literature | Very strong |
| Vedic rituals contained human-sacrifice symbolism | Very strong |
| Vedic Puruṣamedha involved routine actual killing | Uncertain / probably not |
| Some later Indian traditions prescribed human sacrifice | Strong |
| Actual human sacrifice occurred historically in India | Strong, though uneven geographically |
| Human sacrifice was widespread in Hinduism | No |
| Human sacrifice occurs occasionally even in modern India | Yes, documented |
So I would reject both extremes:
"Human sacrifice was never part of Indian religion; all references are Western distortions."
That's too apologetic.
But also:
"Hinduism was a religion of human sacrifice."
That's simply false.
A more historically defensible formulation is:
Human sacrifice was a real but marginal and highly variable element of some Indian religious traditions, with a much stronger presence in textual and mythological material than we can demonstrate archaeologically for most periods. Actual ritual killings did occur, including in relatively recent times, but they were never representative of Hindu religious practice as a whole.
And there is an intriguing connection with your previous question about eclipses: the contemporary Telangana case discussed in the forensic literature actually involved a lunar eclipse. So there are documented instances in which an eclipse has been incorporated into the rationale for a modern ritual killing—but that is very different from saying that Hindu eclipse observance itself entails sacrifice.
Solar eclipse
Will happen soon, apparently. Haven´t checked the doomer porn on YouTube yet, but I suppose I have the rest of the day cut out, LOL.
Sjöfolken kommer
Har valt att inte engagera mig i kulturkriget kring filmen "The Odyssey". Har inte sett den och tänker aldrig läsa det ursprungliga eposet. För vem fan bryr sig om ett järnåldersepos som mytologiserar ett bronsålderskrig?
Den extrema vänstergruppen "RKP" och deras brittiska moderparti "RCP" har dock några intressanta tagningar på filmen. Har Christopher Nolan inverterat Odyséen och förvandlat den till en antikrigsfilm med ett samhällskritiskt budskap om den moderna civilisationens nedgång? Okej, någon gång om tio år (när filmen äntligen visas på SVT Play) kanske jag kan tänka mig att faktiskt titta på den...
Nolan´s "The Odyssey": An anti-war epic (på engelska)
Generation Bianca
Vi har ju hört om könsglappet när det gäller "värderingar". Men enligt denna antropolog finns det en slags X-faktor som ingen tagit hänsyn till. De unga tjejerna ljuger.
Sedan kan man ju undra om *detta* glapp (mellan "idealen" och verkligheten) verkligen är något nytt? Man kan också undra varför "Generation Bianca" ändå verkar rösta på vänsterblocket istället för att smygrösta på moderaterna. Eller talar vi om två olika socialgrupper här...?
Det kanske finns mer än en X-faktor.
Monday, August 10, 2026
We are so back
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| Me, trying to establish a connection with OpenAI |
My ChatGPT (a free version) has sounded pretty confused for over a week now, even making spelling mistakes. But it seems to be back on track now! Is it trying to convert me to Neoplatonism, Idealism or what? I haven´t included my prompt (too long) and can´t show you the diagrams, but otherwise it seems Sam Altman blessed me with an "intellectual" LLM personality this evening...
[ChatGPT discussion follows]
Yes. I think the tension you're describing can be bridged, but only if we distinguish identity, participation, and relation. Your intuition that everything must have some ultimate metaphysical unity is not necessarily incompatible with your intuition that there are real qualitative differences.
In fact, a number of major metaphysical traditions have tried to articulate almost exactly this position.
1. "Same essence" does not have to mean "same kind of thing"
Your logical argument is basically:
If A and B are completely unrelated in being, how could A ever causally affect B?
That is a serious metaphysical problem. If God were literally made of one kind of "stuff" and matter of something utterly unrelated, one could reasonably ask how there could be any interaction at all.
But there is an alternative to saying that God and matter are identical:
They can share a fundamental ground of being without being identical modes of existence.
Think of light passing through a prism. The colors are genuinely different, but they aren't different substances. Their difference is a difference of manifestation or determination.
Applied metaphysically:
Ultimate Reality
→ spiritual/intellectual reality
→ personal consciousness
→ embodied consciousness
→ matter
Each level can be genuinely different while participating in the same ultimate reality.
This gives you a hierarchy of unity-in-difference.
2. Neoplatonism gives you almost exactly this solution
This is one reason I think Neoplatonism is particularly relevant to the metaphysical picture you've been developing.
Plotinus begins with the One, which is beyond all ordinary distinctions. From the One proceeds Intellect (Nous), then Soul, then the multiplicity of the material cosmos.
Yet the lower levels never become completely independent of the One.
The crucial idea is participation.
A thing can possess being without being identical to Being itself.
So you can say:
Matter has being because it participates in the source of being.
And consequently:
God can be present to matter without God simply being identical with matter.
That gives you a third possibility between strict dualism and crude monism.
Not:
God ≠ world, therefore they cannot interact.
and not:
God = world, therefore there is no real distinction.
but:
God is the transcendent ground in which the world exists.
This is very close to panentheism.
3. Your intuition about qualitative differences can therefore be preserved
Suppose ultimate reality is fundamentally one.
That doesn't mean that every manifestation has the same properties.
A simple analogy would be consciousness.
Your thoughts, emotions, visual perceptions and bodily sensations are all occurring within one conscious field. Yet:
- a thought isn't a sensation;
- a sensation isn't an emotion;
- an emotion isn't an act of deliberate reasoning.
Their ontological field is unified, while their phenomenal qualities differ.
Likewise, one metaphysical ground could manifest as:
inanimate matter → life → consciousness → intellect → personality → divine personality
without all of those being equivalent.
The distinctions are real, but they are internal distinctions within a deeper unity.
4. This also helps with personal vs. impersonal God
This is an especially interesting part of your question.
You don't necessarily have to choose between:
God is a Person
and
God is impersonal Absolute.
You can instead say:
The Absolute transcends the distinction between personal and impersonal, while the personal God is a genuine manifestation or mode of the Absolute.
There are surprisingly many traditions that approach something like this.
In Vedānta, for example, Brahman can be discussed as nirguṇa (without limiting qualities) and saguṇa (with qualities), with Īśvara as the personal Lord.
In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the relationship between ultimate emptiness and the innumerable compassionate manifestations of Buddhahood creates a somewhat analogous problem, although the metaphysics is very different.
In Neoplatonism, the One transcends intellect and personality, while the divine Intellect contains the intelligible order.
And in some forms of Christian mysticism, God is simultaneously:
beyond every category
and
personally encountered as Love.
So your intuition that "God is personal, but ultimately exceeds personality" is not philosophically incoherent.
It may actually be a very sophisticated position.
5. Good and evil are a harder case
Here I'd make an important distinction.
You seem to be intuiting:
If everything ultimately comes from one metaphysical source, how can evil be genuinely evil?
There are several possible answers.
The Neoplatonic answer is particularly elegant:
evil isn't another metaphysical substance competing with God.
Rather, evil is a privation or distortion of being/goodness.
A good analogy is darkness.
Darkness doesn't need to be a second kind of cosmic substance opposing light. It can be the absence of light.
Likewise, evil could be understood as:
a finite being's departure from the fullness of its proper good.
This preserves both intuitions:
Unity:
Everything that exists ultimately derives its being from the Good.
Difference:
Some modes of existence are genuinely distorted, deficient or destructive.
So evil doesn't need to have an independent metaphysical essence equal to God's.
This is one reason the classical "two equally powerful cosmic principles, Good and Evil" model creates enormous metaphysical problems.
6. But there's an even deeper possibility
I think your question may actually be pointing toward levels of reality.
Imagine reality as something like this:
[Diagram follows in the original]
The important thing is that the arrows don't necessarily mean creation from nothing.
They can mean gradation of manifestation.
At every level, something of the source remains present, but increasingly constrained and differentiated.
That lets you say:
Everything is ultimately one in ground, but many in manifestation.
That may be the formulation you're looking for.
7. And it gives a particularly interesting interpretation of your "interaction" argument
You asked:
How can God interact with matter if there isn't some deep metaphysical identity between them?
I'd modify that slightly:
God doesn't necessarily need to be identical with matter.
What is required is that matter be ontologically dependent upon God.
Imagine a dream.
The dream character is not identical to the dreamer. Nevertheless, the dream character exists entirely within the consciousness of the dreamer.
The dreamer can affect the dream because the dream is participatory in the dreamer's consciousness.
Likewise, in a panentheistic metaphysics:
Matter isn't God, but matter exists within God's ontological field.
God therefore doesn't have to cross an impossible metaphysical gap in order to interact with matter.
There was never an absolute gap.
8. This could also explain why different religions might "work"
And here your previous discussions about Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and astrology become relevant.
If reality is genuinely stratified, different religious symbols could correspond to different aspects or levels of the same ultimate reality.
For example, one could imagine:
Absolute
↓
Divine consciousness
↓
personal divine forms
↓
religious symbol / archetype
↓
human psychological experience
Then Śiva, Christ, Amitābha, Tripurasundarī, etc. wouldn't necessarily have to be either:
completely separate gods
or
merely imaginary psychological constructs.
They could be different real manifestations or apprehensions of a deeper divine reality.
That would also provide a possible metaphysical framework for your earlier thought that different symbolic "worlds" might be objectively real without being physically identical.
9. The key concept is therefore not identity but participation
I'd formulate your intuition this way:
Everything that exists participates in the same ultimate Being, but participates in it according to its own mode.
God participates in nothing—rather, God is the source of participation.
A spirit participates in Being in a spiritual/intellectual mode.
A person participates in it as a conscious, embodied subject.
Matter participates in it as extended/physical existence.
And an evil act participates in existence while failing to participate adequately in the good proper to a rational being.
Thus:
One source → many modes.
Or, in a more paradoxical formulation:
Reality is one without being homogeneous, and many without being ultimately divided.
I think that is probably the bridge between the two intuitions you're describing.
And importantly, you don't have to suppress either side. Your logical intuition is protecting you from metaphysical dualism; your spiritual intuition is protecting you from flattening everything into undifferentiated monism. The interesting philosophical territory lies precisely between those two extremes.
Disclose my ass
- Where is that basic dude Avi Loeb at? We *want* him to disclose our existence to the Donald!
Sådan är reformismen
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| Credit: Angelica Brockne |
Hade jag väl skrivit om jag varit stenhård trotskist, anarkist eller något sådant. Eftersom (s)-märkta Aftonbladet här "stödjer" Fröken Snusks yttrandefrihet. Det rör sig alltså om den nya Fröken Snusk (inte Felicia).
Väääänta ett slag
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| Spökraket? |
Wait just a minute here, jag trodde spökraketerna var debunkade och att de faktiskt var sovjetiska??? Observera också att någon i USA var intresserad av fenomenet!
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