Vic Shayne
2 min readMar 28, 2024

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This is a difficult article to follow. It seems this Louise person has rubbed you the wrong way.

One of the major topics is God. As I see it, people use this word to mean all sorts of different things so that it's nearly impossible to get to the bottom of it. It's hard to argue, if one really has any insight, that God is an ideal, a symbol, a metaphor. I see it as a metaphor for consciousness except that it is anthropomorphized. Saying that God is good, or love, however, brings up all sorts of red flags, especially if we compare this idea with the God of western religions, which is a wrathful, vengeful, xenophobic being. None of this makes any sense, but that's to be expected when human beings create a being in their own image.

I'm not going through your article point by point, so I'll just touch on one other point, which is the concept of good and bad. These sorts of dualities are inventions of a self that fragments the world into bite-sized pieces. It does this because it has been conditioned, and rightly so, to fragment reality just so it can navigate life. But when this is applied to psychological concepts like good and bad, or love and hate, etc., then we go into a perspective that loses sight of how life really works: We find some things distasteful and painful while other things are pleasant and pleasurable. Out of this, it seems, comes the idea of good and bad. But God is a bigger problem, because it makes no sense and is not consistent in its behavior, just like any mortal.

The moral of the story is: If you want to figure out life, forget everything you think you know about God, religion, science, philosophy, experience, and phenomena and just observe. If you do this for long enough all of these human-made concepts lose their meaning and import.

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Vic Shayne
Vic Shayne

Written by Vic Shayne

NY Times bestselling author writing about reality beyond thought, consciousness, and the self to uncover what is fundamental. https://shorturl.at/mrAS6

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