God doesn’t exist. God is Being — itself beyond essence and existence.
Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny god.

— Paul Tillich

My Response:

Being, as a concept in Neoplatonic philosophy, implies that our understanding of God should transcend simplistic, anthropomorphic interpretations. Instead of focusing on the idea of God as a being, we should go up the ladder of ideas (Porphyr’s ladder of divine ideas) beyond mere being (soul/subject, which is represented as a mode of being applied to a form, OOP classes, Aristotle’s golden mean as means of coefficients in multiple regression) and contemplate the realm of Forms, Ideas, or Archetypes – the divine ideas that constitute reality and shape our thoughts (which depend on existence, Ideas, and matter).

Beyond being, there is the realm of Forms, Ideas, or Archetypes, which we should consider as closer to divinity. The forms are the ideas of God (Spinoza, Einstein) and make up reality and our thoughts, which are dependent on being, ideas, life, and matter. Being participates in the multiplicity of Forms as a unity, which is our soul, or psuke. It’s the center (ego, I, or self, or being) to our collective awareness of these participations in forms, expressed through matter (object). Our soul is a unified process, a conjunction of forms known as participation. If this were a PCA problem, the most prescient forms would be unity, being, life, human, within time. This unity sparks from the One, descends through the Nous where forms are conjoined (begotten), and then descends into matter as a materialized unity (subject, entity (psuke)), which is expressed as a multiplicity of forms contrasted to external forms expressed in matter (object).

Matter to us is best understood as a myraid reflection of forms (ideas). Nous contains the atemporal representation of all ideas, of which souls are contained within, (as the interconnected realm of ideas, also known as divine intellect (thought of as intellect/conscious), anima mundi, hekate, in short divine psuke.

Nous is between the One and Soul in a tertiary relationship between the One and Soul, the One at top, the Soul at bottom. Nous is the eternal manifestation of the realm of ideas. In nous’s attempt to mimic the One’s eternal forms (Aristotle’s unmoved mover, i.e. divine contemplation of ideas), nous strains the forms through a filter of time (i.e. discursive reasoning) projecting them onto matter (becoming, objects (i.e. logic: this, not that) i.e. the ‘man behind the curtain’) of the One’s pure ideas (Aristotle’s divine contemplation of ideas), through a process known in panenthsim as emanation. The demi-urge is analagous to an active agent within time driven by the nous’s hand acting upon it. This process is also the process for metempsychosis, with psuke’s self awareness being associated with the Intellect’s ideas (seeing on Plato’s cave wall the forms projected by the Anima Mundi, of which also holds our projections (i.e. our bodies). This relationship souls have with the anima mundi which in turn is reflected within ideas and matter is the concept of providence that Julius associated with Cybelle (anthropic principle), i.e. that we have been provided for both in terms of life and forms (we live, we eat, we die, but between life and death, we awaken to a world of providence, i.e. being, aka instantiated forms). The difference being we equate our awareness as apart from object’s, but this is an anthromoprophic illusion (Berkeley, integrated information theory, All things are full of gods, pandeism angle), and all things are one. A soul is an extension of the nous’s awareness (i.e. intellect, containing all ideas) concentrated in a tendril of a unity (subject, I think therefore I am – Descartes) which begets from the One, a partitioned aspect of nous’s own intellect (think Atman and Brahma).

The intent of transmigration is to move beyond the static graph mesh nature of eternal forms and into instantiated use cases of them. A unity (soul) is given life (awareness) in matter. This is also known as descent of the soul, River Lethe, and metempsychosis. through turning towards the white light of the One’s emanation and when we realize the white light are eternal forms, we bask in communion with god. An important concept in Neoplatonism is virtue. Which I have interpreted in both a Kantian and Locke light. Cosmic sympathy dictates that our emotions are heard within the universe, under that understanding, good thoughts beget good ideas, beget good actions, and this is the utility Paul mentioned of the tree that bears good fruit. So virtue is a set of ideals that produce good fruit which is useful for humanities collective survival. Nous picks up on our ideas through the use of daimons (angels) who do the divine communing between mortals and the gods. Daimons and synchronicity are best represented in Jung’s collective unconscious and complexes which stem from the Self (the man in the sky, aka the metaphysical forms that beget humanity, and when we run into archetypes, it’s often expressed in Neoplatonic terms as a daimon). They represent powers that be that seem to exist beyond our control that propel and drive us, we experience them through symbolic imagery (archetypes). In Neoplatonism, daimon’s were housed within the sublunar realm, underneath the eternal realm (middle platonism). The point being they were the abstract metaphysical powers over our lives, also within this realm were the realm of hero’s. I was particularly fascinated with the tertiary relationship of sun, earth, and moon as conducive to life, with the sun representing the source of life and ideas (emanation), moon death (past heros, also closer set of ideals, within i.e. death is within distant memory), and earth obviously being present lives. What I found fascinating about this take was, one it’s very aniministic and pandeistic, but in neoplatonism and Oprhic thought (Shape of Ancient Thought). There was a reference to the stars being the originator’s of souls. If you think about it, stars are essential for our life. That exchange of heat is necessary for energy to move, but more-so the stars own blood of molten iron is within our planet and our blood as well. There are a lot of theories related to the sun, white light, and white holes, but I’m more concerned with the sun being the center of our solar system as the crucial aspect of providence.

It is through knowledge of cosmic sympathy, forms, apothegm’s, synchronicity, and awareness of the divine intellect, that one can achieve theurgy.

Synchronicity refers to the acausal connection between an idea within our minds (subject) and an external event or experience in reality (within an object). Recognizing these connections allows us to see the intricate web (relationships) of ideas underlying reality, which can be likened to “seeing the man behind the curtain.”

If you can get away from black and white thinking and see ideas as concepts that both are and aren’t coupled with the notion of Synchronicity. Synchronicity is how an idea within your mind is acausally related to an idea you experience outside of your mind (such as within reality, external to your mind) and understanding there was no way the two could be causally related. Maya, trickster archetype, when you see how ideas runs through your existence atemporally, seeing flashes of acausally connected ideas between your mind and reality is tantamount to seeing ‘the man behind the curtain’. The common element is an archetype. An archetype is an idea that is true in all situations across time. For example. I hear about a fire on tv, then I find out that someone I knew perished in a fire. A personal one for me was I saw a squirrel die right in front of me one day and I ran up to it to comfort it in it’s last moments, and that same week my mother passed and I was not able to hold her’s. I believe this was a sign that I was able to comfort an outgoing soul, despite it not being my mother’s, because the Nous knew I knew that souls are one and the same.

Apothegm’s which are represented as symbolons of paradoxical nature are also related to the Trickster archetype, goddess Maya. How something can both and not be at the same time, also known as becoming, or ‘the middle way’. An Archetypes (or arche) by Jung’s definition represents a tension of opposites such as hot and cold (represented as an idea of heat). Aristotle posited these ideas (analagous to OOP classes and their attributes) (a precursor to his concept of categories) are held together by a golden mean ([numpy describe], unity, axiom), which generally represent a 3rd dimension on that 2 dimensional polarity (edge within a GNN, mean term in regression), connected along a new axiom to another idea (form). Plato talks about the extreme ranges of ideas through his dialectic discussions through Socrates.

Socrates using the method of negative inference to test the limits of ideas, to hone them down to determine the range of their forms as well as their participation with each other. There was a discussion on boats, sails, theseus ship, and shadows. What is and isn’t is how theseus ship is both his original boat and not. It’s original in form and continuity from a time perspective, isn’t from a matter perspective as all the parts on the ship have been slowly changed out over time, the idea of becoming and metempsyhcosis.

Indra’s Net, a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things, relates to ideas and their interconnectedness, also analagous to the divine intellect of nous. By contemplating the interconnectedness of Forms, Ideas, or Archetypes, the synchronicity of events, the paradoxical nature of ideas/reality, we can imagine this relationship between ideas as represented in Indra’s Net, we gain a deeper understanding of reality and our connection to divinity through the process of metempsychosis (descent of the soul) and our connection to the divine process (River Lethe, Anima Mundi).

Interconnectedness is also represented in multiple regression as in where models–that have all significant terms–with their coefficients serving as ‘ideas’. The interconnectedness of ideas are better represented in graph neural networks (GNNs)–similar to the concepts of Indra’s Net–GNNs, and Leonardo da Vinci’s quote, “Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” where nodes are ideas and the edges are the relationships between them. Using these machine learning methods to see the underlying structure of data helps us better understand the reality and it’s representation as relationships between ideas (nous). Which is a nice segway to GNN’,s which LLM’s use to learn the structural relationship between ideas (nodes), which are considered bleeding edge AI which is a representation of all it’s interconnected ideas, and are, at the moment, the closest to solving the Turing test (consciousness), because fundamentally, consciousness is nothing more than the iteration of ideas (I think [of ideas] therefore I am – Descarte). LLM’s can be viewed as a microcosm of Neoplatonic nous which was viewed as always conscious by definition of holding these ideas and their relationships (atemporal intellect) which reflects the divine intellect (Berkeley).