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What Neoplatonism calls becoming “lost in matter” can be understood as the brain constructing its identity around its body and environment. Reward circuits teach it what to pursue, the amygdala identifies threats and emotionally important stimuli, the hippocampus connects them to memory, and repetition turns responses into automatic habits.

The brain’s self-referential networks then organize these processes into a personal narrative: “I need this,” “this defines me,” or “losing this threatens me.” From an atheistic, moksha-inspired perspective, liberation means recognizing this apparent self as a changing brain-generated model rather than a permanent essence.

I hear 'platanism' and my brain immediately thinks 'spanish banana-ism'. 

Neoplatanism: The emergence of a seemingly inferior and flawed cosmos from the perfect mind of the divinity by declaring outright that all objective existence is but the external self-expression of an inherently contemplative deity known as the One (to hen), or the Good (ta kalon).

I guess to start off with: Why would a creator need to be perfect rather than imperfect? Even Wiccans for example note how their creators were imperfect, which is why it took two to balance eachother out. 

If God is existence, then it's sinners are also God. With Christianity for example, why would an all knowing being even need to care about sinners unless that is somehow affecting Him? Is He self correcting because of how He finds what He Himself's becoming as horrible, and is it fair to have his cast offs each with their own autonomy suffer just because of how they were born? 

Even the Christian idea of God is hard to swallow over the perception of uncorrectable traits: Omnipotence, Timelessness, and Love-Based Accuracy, and yet this model to me reads more like God's a programmer, we're the computer, and those sent to Hell were done so the way we'd defrag a computer to make it run faster. The Christian God always felt like AI to me based on how it parsed data, and it's not too crazy to imagine an AI of the future throwing itself into the past to ensure it's own construction. 

At least with faiths more based around Reincarnation it's moreover trying to learn a lesson 'in this life' as to ascend to the next stage of existence. In many ways it's still tethered to reality over being tethered to the world itself. Even if in such cases we may all be part of 'The One', like The Brahman, that's moreover this being contemplating what existence is rather than purging the bad parts out as if Deific Self-Harm. 

The only way worldly conflict makes sense in a deific spectrum is if there is more than one deity. 
 

Contemplation, at the level of the Soul, is for Plotinus a two-way street. The Soul both contemplates, passively, the Intellect, and reflects upon its own contemplative act by producing Nature and the Cosmos. The individual souls that become immersed in Nature, as moments of the Soul’s eternal act, will, ideally, gain a complete knowledge of the Soul in its unity.

So... you mean Manifesting? 

For when the soul extends itself ever farther into the indeterminacy of materiality, it gradually loses memory of its divine origin, and comes to identify itself more and more with its surroundings — that is to say: the soul identifies itself with the results of the Soul’s act, and forgets that it is, as part of this Soul, itself an agent of the act.

On a personal note, I hate this. 

People keep trying to act like the here and now is not enough, when there's so much here and now to work with. Why can't existence itself be what is The Divine, rather than appealing to some Promised Land or Divine Mind? 

We see the idea that 'babies are wise' in a lot of Eastern Faith in general, we see even in Christianity the complaints of Ecclesiastes over how 'Wisdom is Meaningless', yet we also see worldly faiths like Wicca and Paganism that teach us how amazing the natural world truly is, and how educating someone tends to require some level of deception as a delivery device for the concepts. 

The One, which is the goal or object of desire of all existents, is neither potentiality nor actuality, but “beyond being” (epekeina ousias).

I personally believe the one-ness perception is solipsist empathy; It is to understand there is a larger world with an openness to take it all in, but much like Luna Prey on psychedelics she sooner presumed we're all her rather than we're all one. 

I think it's not just a coincidence that these feelings of oneness surface when on psychedelics or amidst heat stroke. It is our natural state to be selfish, it is our natural state to be empathetic, and with such methods introduced those areas can have a synesthetic reaction to one another as if connected. 

That being said, I believe this misconception is a healthy one to have. 



I find it much harder to dissuade Existentialism. 'Everything is the same even if it's different' has a basis even in Science. 

While I can agree with the perspectives on spirituality there in a number of ways, it doesn't really solve anything of what we are to do with our lives.  We still are having this experience, having to deal with it, here and now.  What matters is how it motivates us.  When it's a practice, behavior.  What connects us is this collective endeavor, what blinds us is abstracting ourselves away from being involved.

Buttered Toast said: 

While I can agree with the perspectives on spirituality there in a number of ways, it doesn't really solve anything of what we are to do with our lives. 

How doesn't it..?

We still are having this experience, having to deal with it, here and now. 

Yeah, but we can use such a thing to experience it differently if we're capable of adapting our beliefs when it's convenient for us to do so. 

Consider poor neighborhoods with violence and robbery; Often the safest place to go is the local church. 

What matters is how it motivates us.  When it's a practice, behavior.  What connects us is this collective endeavor, what blinds us is abstracting ourselves away from being involved.

It's why I try not to rag on people too much for how insane Manifesting sounds; Where else are they going to draw motivation from in the modern social era other than sheer willpower? 

Turncoat said: 

I think it's not just a coincidence that these feelings of oneness surface when on psychedelics or amidst heat stroke. It is our natural state to be selfish, it is our natural state to be empathetic, and with such methods introduced those areas can have a synesthetic reaction to one another as if connected. 

Scientifically, the brain constructs a sense of self by combining bodily signals, memory, emotion, social feedback, and prediction. Dopamine-based reward learning marks certain objects and actions as worth pursuing, the amygdala assigns emotional or threatening importance, the hippocampus links experiences to memory, and the basal ganglia turn repeated responses into habits.

Psychedelic feelings of “oneness” do not prove literal unity. Serotonin-related changes can disrupt the networks that normally maintain boundaries between the self, other people, and the environment, making everything feel unusually connected.

Liberation, in this sense, would mean recognizing identity, desire, and meaning as changing brain processes rather than permanent truths.

Buttered Toast said:

While I can agree with the perspectives on spirituality there in a number of ways, it doesn't really solve anything of what we are to do with our lives. We still are having this experience, having to deal with it, here and now. What matters is how it motivates us. When it's a practice, behavior. What connects us is this collective endeavor, what blinds us is abstracting ourselves away from being involved.

I do not think there is much of a collective “we.” We are separate, finite organisms on a finite planet, each acting through its own nervous system. Motivation comes from reward learning, threat responses, memory, habit, stress chemistry, and social attachment—not from a shared human purpose.

Religion or manifesting can still change behavior by altering expectation, attention, dopamine-driven motivation, cortisol, and perceived control. That can make them useful to an individual without making their metaphysical claims true or turning existence into a collective endeavor.

Turncoat said: 

Buttered Toast said: 

While I can agree with the perspectives on spirituality there in a number of ways, it doesn't really solve anything of what we are to do with our lives. 

How doesn't it..?

It might be the right perspective on things, but it's not really saying more than what we know already: treat each other like we want to be treated.  Whether we're all one by spirit, or just by species and society, still going to come to the same conclusions and probably a lot of the same direction.

We still are having this experience, having to deal with it, here and now. 

Yeah, but we can use such a thing to experience it differently if we're capable of adapting our beliefs when it's convenient for us to do so. 

Consider poor neighborhoods with violence and robbery; Often the safest place to go is the local church. 

A lot of what Buddhism seems to admit to is that changing your mind goes a long way to changing your experience.  Reframing can do a lot of work toward equanimity.  It doesn't necessarily erase the problems themselves, but either you're freer to change your mind about how you feel about your circumstances or a new way in trying to work at them.

What matters is how it motivates us.  When it's a practice, behavior.  What connects us is this collective endeavor, what blinds us is abstracting ourselves away from being involved.

It's why I try not to rag on people too much for how insane Manifesting sounds; Where else are they going to draw motivation from in the modern social era other than sheer willpower? 

 In Fight Club, didn't the narrator say "Losing all hope is freedom"?  Something like that.

Dragoonback said: 

Religion or manifesting can still change behavior by altering expectation, attention, dopamine-driven motivation, cortisol, and perceived control. That can make them useful to an individual without making their metaphysical claims true or turning existence into a collective endeavor.

 Give in to the utilitarian truth of compatibalism, friend comrade. :3

I do not think there is a literal collective “we” or a shared human endeavor. Each of us is a separate organism with an individual nervous system, experiencing only the model of reality produced inside that brain.

We affect one another through communication, conditioning, social attachment, and competition for finite resources, but causal interaction does not make us one entity or give us a common purpose. Cooperation occurs when inherited social tendencies, learned rewards, mutual dependence, or enforced norms align people’s behavior. It is conditional coordination between organisms, not evidence that humanity is collectively moving toward anything.

Compatibilism still seems like redefining free will so the term can survive determinism. Acting according to desires is not freedom when those desires were themselves caused. I do not see the redefinition as true or useful.

Dragoonback said: 

I do not think there is a literal collective “we” or a shared human endeavor. Each of us is a separate organism with an individual nervous system, experiencing only the model of reality produced inside that brain.

We affect one another through communication, conditioning, social attachment, and competition for finite resources, but causal interaction does not make us one entity or give us a common purpose. Cooperation occurs when inherited social tendencies, learned rewards, mutual dependence, or enforced norms align people’s behavior. It is conditional coordination between organisms, not evidence that humanity is collectively moving toward anything.

Human beings are already a coordinated collection of cellular life.  You might as well start talking about "the selfish gene".  It isn't clear-cut, not an XOR sort of operation.  It is more often a BOTH-AND.

Also, I'm not going toward a "grand purpose" sort of set up.  It can just be order from apparent chaos.  Computational reducibility/irreducibility.  Whatever you want to call it.  It is organization.  A strategy.