https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=yRqiNYPFbwk
Hello everyone, I’d like to announce a new course I’m going to be teaching at Halkian Academy. It’s called Ultimate Reality God and Beyond. I’ll talk in a minute about that very provocative title. First, important things, it’s going to be starting April 5th. It will be eight weeks, not eight consecutive weeks because I’m attending conferences, but it’s all scheduled out. The link to the homepage for the course will be put in the notes to this promo. Each session will be two hours. There’ll be one hour of me doing a lecture and then one hour of Q&A. Now there are options you can purchase where you can attend the lecture live and participate in the live Q&A. Or you can also go through this course asynchronously and you can purchase it at that level if that works better with your schedule and or your finances. I’ve done one of these courses before, Beyond Nihilism, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I consider it by all the feedback a success and I very much wanted to follow it up. Which gets me to the title. The Beyond was a way of pointing to some continuity with the previous course, Beyond Nihilism, which is also available asynchronously on Halcyon if you wish to take a look at that. I’m not assuming that people have gone through Beyond Nihilism. The course, Ultimate Reality, God and Beyond is a standalone course, but I’m also structuring it so those people who have taken Beyond Nihilism will find connection and continuity. That’s a bit of a tricky thing to do as a teacher, but I do have quite a bit of experience with doing that kind of thing for my many years of teaching at the university. So that’s one reason for the title. Now the other title is God and Beyond. What could possibly be Beyond God? What could that mean? That’s just a silly contradiction, isn’t it? Well, that’s the issue. That’s the issue that the course is going to wrestle with. When we come into or try to enter into a philosophically reflective and deep relationship with what we consider to be ultimate reality, is that relationship best captured by what we think of when we think of God? Now, what many of you will say to me is, but there’s many different possible meanings, and that’s exactly what this course will explore. But the idea that there is a somewhat standard notion, Abrahamic notion perhaps, of God is one we’ll be making use of and whether or not that actually is the best way of understanding ultimate reality. So in order to do that, we’ll be taking a look at a bunch of thinkers. The one is Robert Carter in his amazing book, The Nothingness Beyond God. And you can see the title of that book resonating with the title of the course in which he explores the work of Nishida from the Kyoto School, which is somebody deeply influenced by both Heidegger and Zen. And of course, Heidegger famously in his famous critique of ontotheology, criticized that our standard notion of God as a supreme being fundamentally misrepresents being itself, because being itself is no kind of individual thing or being. And that’s the no thingness beyond God. If God is some kind of super thing, then ultimate reality is a no thing beyond that. And that was explored, of course, by Nishida making use of both Heidegger and Zen. And we want to enter into discussion about this. Please understand that this is a very exploratory thing. This course is helping me do some deep thinking in dialogue with others who are coming in good faith and want to engage in deep reflection and discussion in preparation for the next series I’m doing on the Philosophical Silk Road. And so being part of the course is a way of participating in the contribution of that project. We’ll also be taking a look at the work of the Canadian atheist, Schellingberg, especially in his book Evolutionary Religion, but we’ll also be taking a look at all at least be bringing in his book Religion and Religion After Science and also talking about the hiddenness argument. I think he is famous for being the author of the hiddenness argument, which is considered a sort of new argument against the existence of a personal God. Now, you may say, oh, an atheist. Be very careful. Schellingberg is not a typical atheist. Schellingberg is somebody who wants us to look at, take very seriously the possibility of ultimate reality and very seriously what he calls a triple transcendence. That ultimate reality is transcendent in being most real and also it’s also in some sense most valuable, you know, beyond the true, the good and the beautiful and also most transformative. And he thinks this proposal that human beings that there is such an ultimate reality that human beings can enter into a relationship with it and be transformed by it is one that we should take very seriously. But within a particular frame, he says he points to deep time, how science has discovered deep time, billions of years in the past, billions of years in the future. The species has existed for 200,000 years. We seem to be spiritually oriented from about 40,000 BCE. So we have all of this going on. And yet we also have this deep future ahead of us. And he poses this question. He says, given the depth of the questions we’re asking about ultimate reality, is it likely that we are mature enough as a species that we have got complete answers to this? When, of course, we don’t have complete answers about the nature of the atom or that we don’t have complete answers about how disease works or how the mind works or how the body works. Isn’t it presumptuous to think that we have finished complete answers about ultimate reality? So he wants us to engage in the reflect upon the proposal that we might be as a species, not individual, spiritually immature. And then he asks, what do we need to do in order to mature ourselves across time and across generations such that we could come into the kind of work that would give us. A plausible claim on getting an answer to that question of whether or not ultimate reality has that triple transcendence for us. And I think this is a very profound idea, because I think the deep time aspect of our reflections upon ultimate reality within standard Axial age religion and philosophy has not been properly understood or taken into account. And so this is very provocative. It opens us up and it, of course, allows science at the table. Now, of course, he also criticizes, and this is what makes him so interesting. He also criticizes the atheists who think they can come to a complete conclusion about ultimate reality from a framework that is very plausibly one of spiritual immaturity. So we will be taking a look at that and we’ll be looking at what happens if we adopt deep humility with respect to the question of ultimate reality. God and beyond what happens, what do we open ourselves up to and what becomes really important for him is the role, the aspirational role of imagination, especially in the imaginal sense. We’ll then be taking a look at the astonishing work of James Filler, who I will actually be meeting in person in April. Unfortunately, his book is quite expensive, so instead we’ll be reading three papers where he makes the argument. That the Neoplatonic tradition made an argument, which is that ultimate reality is pure relationality rather than a substance. Now, when he uses substance, he’s ultimately meaning it in not just a Cartesian sense, but in Aristotelian. Substances are individual things that are considered to be able to exist independently and are the subjects of properties. They’re the owner of properties and they enter into relations with other things. And so there are things from which relations emerge and Filler’s arguments go to show that that seems to have things exactly the wrong way around. It looks like relationality is ultimate and the things emerge out of it. And so, of course, this relationality is a no thing because that’s just what things emerge from. And this meshes, of course, with some of the fundamental arguments of Neoplatonism. And I think moving off of that thing-based substance ontology is a fundamental shift, a new way of thinking profoundly and relating to ultimate reality that takes us into that space of God and beyond. The final person is Bracken, whose book, The Divine Matrix, is written from a Whiteheadian perspective, which I think is very important because Whitehead in some ways integrates that pure relationality with the dynamic view of the world given to us by science. But what he does is he takes a look, Bracken, at the Western traditions, reflections on ultimate reality and Eastern reflections, Taoism, Vedanta, Buddhism. And he is trying to propose what we can see being held in common. And this, of course, is very much like a through line, like the philosophical Silk Road. And he comes to some very interesting conclusions from this argument about what ultimate reality is and how we could come to a shared understanding. It doesn’t mean we all will become Hindus or we’ll all become Buddhists or we’ll all even become Whiteheadians or that we will all become Christians or Jews. What he says is this gives us a shareable relationship to ultimate reality between people who talk about that ultimate reality as a god and people like Daoists with the Tao or the Vedantists with Brahman or the Buddhists with Shunyata, who do not talk about ultimate reality as God, but nevertheless consider it to be triply transcendent. And so this is all in service of an observation that I have been sharing with a lot of the people that I enter in deep discussion with, which is in response to the meaning crisis, there seems to be an advent of the sacred taking place in many different parts of the world, different communities, different philosophical currents. And I’ve just pointed to you a bunch. There’s many, many more that converge on this. People are fundamentally reframing our relationship to ultimate reality. And I think this is a way of trying to give us a new way of living in relationship to the sacred, which will offer people a living response to the problem of the meaning crisis. Now, this is all something I am proposing, and I am proposing that we discuss it together. And you help me as much as I try to teach you that we discuss it together as we try to wrestle with this question about ultimate reality, God and beyond. So I look forward to seeing you in the course. As I said, the notes for both the date, which starts on April the 5th and the link and how you can register will be found in the in will contain the information in the notes to this promo. So thank you very much. And I look forward to seeing you in ultimate reality, God and beyond.