You mean people who claim to have experienced infinity. People who have actually experienced infinity in a way that can be demonstrated, do not exist, regardless of how fervent their claims.
Bolding mine.
In what form would you like this to be presented?
By definition, a phenomenon such as an individual consciousness experiencing infinity could not be communicated to your inidividual consciousness via the 5 senses. All you would get would be something being communicated to your consciousness via the 5 senses.
This remains true even for more mundane individual experiences. For Fred, who has who has never fallen in love, or gotten drunk, or taken an LSD trip.. Fred would never be able to demonstrate the reality of such experiences to Tom, who has never experienced the above themself, individually...
unless Tom took some kind of leap of faith, by taking Fred's word for it, and drinking 12 beers, or taking LSD, or putting an ad in the Lonely Hearts column.
Tom has to
have faith and make some effort towards the reported experience in order to test the claim.
The difference between these examples and experiencing infinite consciousness is one simply of greater difficulty, (as it requires much greater personal commitment), but the general principle remains the same.
LOL. You mean that in your magical world it means something? I'm sure it does. In my magical world I can reverse time. That's the great thing about magical worlds, you get to make your own definitions of reality.
Tricky, are you tipsy again?
Hardly faith. Evidence. But if you can provide concrete, objectively verifiable evidence of one infinite thing, I will be willing to reverse my position.
You keep making these basic philosophical errors. By "objectively verifiable" what you are meaning is (correct me if I'm wrong) "communicable via the 5 senses". Unless you can enlighten me as to how infinity could be communicated via the eye, nose, ear, tongue, or skin then I just have to conclude that you're hopelessly confused on this one.
That's no crime, most materialists here are too.
Actually, I'm not a big fan of duality either. The only "ality" I'm into is reality. And real things have evidence.
I would agree to a point. Your problem is that you are only willing to accept a particular type of evidence.. i.e. that which is communicable via the 5 senses. For you, it seems, the fact that some forms of truth are not amenable to communication via the senses, means that you feel within your rights to dismiss these truths out of hand.
But this is not a position that can be seriously held for long, if you really think about it. Because then you would be forced to dismiss the truths of logic, mathematics, morality, and aesthetics.
Because mathematicians can show their work in an objectively verifiable way. But of course, not all math describes reality. There are even such things in math as "imaginary numbers".
Some people (I'd guess at least 95% of the population, including me) can look at a mathematical proof, and not make head nor tail of it. The people who
claim to be able to make head or tail of it are people who have devoted years of their lives in training in order to develop the mathematical perception of their individual consciousnesses. The claims of these mathematicians gain or lose validity only when compared with the individual mathematical perceptions of others of their ilk.
So it is not "showing their work in an objectively verifiable way", it is showing their work to a highly specialised group of trained people who test what is offered against a particular aspect of their individual consciousnesses.
You might train yourself as a mathematician
because you believe that maths has something valid and interesting to say about reality, and thus you'd probably learn something.
But, due to your insistence on demonstrability via the senses, in this lifetime you'll probably never take any steps to train yourself spiritually. Thus you have shut off a whole area of human experience, which is a shame, really.
This is not an "unknown reason". Mathematicians all work with the same rule book. They can't redefine infinity. They can't say the value of pi is three. Your magic world has no such constraints.
My magic world has many constraints. For example, egotism/selfishness will never ever lead to spiritual progress. Other examples: identification with the body/mind has to be left behind for progress... the more you want the less happy you will be.... desire lies at the root of a restless mind.... treating people as means rather than ends will backfire on you, via the moral law of karma, .. etc.. etc..
Spiritual teachers work with similar rules in the great traditions.
If you're going to use metaphors, then yes, you can say hate is a force. I can say lutefisk is a force. Neither one of us can be proved wrong because they're metaphors. Metaphors are a poor tool for defining reality.
The difference is that neither you nor I have personal experience of lutefisk as a force. Yet you, I, and the rest of humanity all have personal experience of hate as a force.
That is why 'hate' is a commonly understood concept, whereas 'lutefisk' is not.
You are right. I was incorrect to act as if I represented everyone here. In my opinion, what you were saying is spiritual gobbledygook. I could be wrong, but I think you will find that in this particular forum, that opinion will be more common than not. You are invited to test this. Many of us have spent enough time in churches and other spiritual situations to recognize the metaphorical language they use.
Fair enough
I do not believe you can define "infinite love" in any meaningful way, one that can be used by philosophers without ambiguity. You cannot simply make words mean anything you like. This is a trap that amateur philosophers fall into again and again.
As I said right at the start for "infinite love" to be meaningful via communication, the phrase would have to be passed between two consciousnesses who had individually experienced it. (Remember, that would also hold true of two mathematicians whose mathematical perceptual abilities have provided them the same individual experience of a particular truth)
I have not, and I'm guessing you haven't either.
But I'm not so arrogant to assume that the limits of my individual experiences to date circumscribe the limits of all of human experience. I have studied quite a bit the lives and teachings of many individuals who claim to have experienced this. Their lives are exemplary, and their teachings are insightful, internally rational, enlightening, and inspirational.
You have one kind of faith, I have another. That's all it is.
