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ABSOLUTE

Book by Dejan Stojanovic · 50 quotes · Dejan Stojanovic, Absolute, Universe

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ABSOLUTE Quotes

“If the highest possible degree of truth is obtained through the highest degree of genuine desire or will for truth, coupled with personal ability and genius, then the result must lead to some power. This power is the result of the will to truth, measured only by the truth, irrespective of personal interests, and as such, it equates to goodness. Therefore, goodness is the only source of real power (not actual power sold as power, though it may be abuse, trick, or anything else). The only source of the ability to find the real truths and decipher the actual state of the world is goodness. We can find the essence only in goodness because it is a channel through which the real essences travel (through which wisdom flows).”

“Any attempt to change reality is futile, but attempts to impose our views and definitions onto reality can be profitable. We often try to impose our ideas and descriptions, irrespective of their merits and correspondence to reality and facts. Then, we try to make reality fit our views and definitions instead of the opposite. At this point, truth and facts become irrelevant except our ideas about them (which can easily be a trick), and this is the highest level of dishonesty, intellectual and social. Often, this kind of thinking and this kind of practice lead to dogmatic thought and demagogy, which is a basis for all sorts of oppression and enslavement (of souls), either politically or religiously. This kind of thinking, in the fields of arts and sciences, leads to different types of manipulation, calculated to lower the standards to promote personal ideas or “qualities” that are not per the highest standards. If that is the case, the only way to establish (“legitimize”) qualities or merits of lesser value is by lowering the standards. If everything is possible and has a value, the point of discussion or interest shifts to the question of any particular value of anything, irrespective of its merits. In any field, the supreme qualities and their merits result from the highest standards, not some arbitrary judgment.”

“Only goodness can understand and measure the highest and the deepest truths because it is never satisfied with the sheer power of winning but only with the power of real power, the truth itself, represented in the best possible way. If the measure of power is not accurate, then that is an illusion or abuse of power, which can be measured and felt (unfortunately) by other humans but is not a real measure of real power.”

“The sheer will to power is corrupted not by power itself but by an undeserved power. Undeserved power is only possible through a compromised or corrupt will. Power doesn’t corrupt. Only an undue and excessive power corrupts. If we say that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” we mean that the insatiable (“absolute”) appetite for power, irrespective of merits, corrupts. But the deserved power or the deserved absolute power, if even possible to imagine, would not be expressed or manifested as such because it would be an actual representation and manifestation of goodness, which is different and opposed to our view of real power.”

“We must reevaluate and enrich the idea of God to encompass all inquiries, including scientific and philosophical, to fit reality and the truth instead of serving our more or less sophisticated but still poor or poorly presented and imposed ideas. This enriched idea of God is not only the ultimate goal but an ultimate reality we shall strive to understand fully or get closer to.”

“Nonexistence equates with death in a way. But, for death, something must be born to be able to die. Non-existence excludes both birth and death. On the other hand, everything that does exist is programmed or destined to motion. Without some movement or growth through space and time, there is no actual existence, but rather the non-existence camouflaged in the robe of “non-existing” existence, which was only a dead existence at the same spot forever, without motion, without time, without birth or real death, which equates non-existence.”

“Existence is in constant motion and growth (regardless of progress or regress), moving through time and space (including entropy) with all its other attributes. Only something alive can contain and reflect these attributes. Existence, in and of itself, is life itself. The ability and capacity to think do not equate to the wholeness of life. Still, life itself equates to existence as a whole, including the existence of inorganic matter or something we are used to calling “dead matter.” Everything that exists, regardless of our conception of it and how it appears to us, is alive. Existence is life.”

“Beyond existence, there is no death, only non-existence or Non-Being. But without non-existence or Non-Being, the existence of the “material” world would not be possible, and consequently, life would not be possible. Non-existence, or Non-Being, is characterized by an equally important “power” in the existence of existence, or life, itself. (Nonbeing provides or secures the possibility of birth and death or the illusion of transformation.)”

“Even if we proclaim that life equates to existence, the word life, irrespective of its correct and applicable meanings on various levels, is still insufficient to describe or relate to the totality of life. In the terminological sense, we must enrich the word life to mean or include the whole existence, irrespective of our inherited way of thinking. In this way, the new term of the same word, with an enriched meaning, would be rightly established.”

“The life of non-thinking beings does not equate to the existence of all. The sheer existence of anything is proof of its life; otherwise, it would not exist. Only non-existent is not alive. Life would not be possible if existence did not contain life in its totality. What is manifested as life, appearing to us as real life, is only the evolution or transformation of existence, which is already having a life. Our understanding and description of life do not equate with life itself but only with our definition and understanding.”

“The truth will always be what it is; the facts will always be what they are. Since we cannot change the truth or the facts, we can only change (improve) our minds, descriptions, and understanding. As long as we fight to preserve our truths and facts, provided they are not representations of the “absolute truth” and facts, we fight against the facts and the truth under the disguise of our definitions and proclamations sold as “real truths and facts.”

“The objective measure of beauty is beauty itself. The real measure of life is life itself. The objective measure of existence is existence itself. We are part of the beauty of the existing world. Through us, the world measures and enjoys itself in its myriad ways. Life and the world impose standards, but we also make and impose our standards. Our standards must be in accordance, to the highest degree, with the factual state of the world to be a real representation of the world at its best. If our standards deviate from this high demand, then what is left is mostly simulacrum, proportionate to the degree of our deviation or departure from the highest possible standards.”

“Living by the highest possible standards means opening the doors of the highest truths through the possible means. To live by the sheer desire or “will to power” means to open the labyrinths of personal truths and thoughts that we camouflage as facts and truths themselves. Only the desire and will to goodness can be the model for obtaining the highest truths possible. In that way, the highest obtainable power comes not from the will to power but from the will to truth itself, representing the will to goodness and wisdom obtained in such a manner.”

“The power of real power would lead to the representation of goodness, obtained by deserved truth (ultimate wisdom). A deserved truth is the source of happiness (through wisdom) and the power without the representation of power in the way we are used to. Real power, as the representation of the truth, is “shy” because its purpose is not to impress, oppress, or enslave but to enliven, enrich, and empower life itself (which is the life of all and not only those who hold power).”

“The pursuit of truth (which must imply God, among other things) must lead to God if it exists. Nothing can be beyond the truth. If God is the ultimate principle, then this principle is the truth itself. The truth is independent and indifferent to the name or word we use to describe it, whether it be the Ultimate Source of Everything or God. If we look at God in this way, God equals the truth. But what spoils or may spoil our inquiry about God or truth, regardless of our sincerity, is not God or the truth itself but our distorted knowledge of both. (Also, the problem of language.)”

“The statement that either God is the ultimate cause of the Universe or that the Universe appeared from nothing contains falsity because there is a third modality, which is that the Universe may have created itself. But, if the Universe has created itself, it had existed before its creation. If it existed before, what would be the difference between this Being and God, or would it mean that this Being is something we traditionally have chosen to call God?”

“What makes space possible? Just of itself, space is nothing. But without nothingness, there is no space. Space is made only from nothingness. Without Nothingness, the Absolute would not be complete, and there would be no potential for space in the world. Absolute would be impossible without nothingness. Absolute, without the void, is zero, and the void, without the Absolute, is zero. Zero can only be equal to itself, which means that even in the supposed separation of the Absolute from zero, they become the same and only one—Zero.”

“Everything singular can be conceived and, sooner or later, comprehended by thought. Everything that is not true has the potential to be disclosed as such—not accurate. However, in its totality, the final, absolute truth is beyond reach—it is hiding and shifting. Still, as perfection, the Absolute cannot be untrue because, in that case, it would not be perfection. Therefore, it must be perfect and true at the same time. It is possible to conceive the Absolute as the truth. In this sense, it is possible to conceive that Nothing is the truth.”

“Everything in nature coexists with something else. Our perceptions come from relations. We must see and perceive what we experience in specific ways; slight differences don’t count. What we see is not a matter of choice for the most part—to see the world, to feel heat, cold, and fear. All that exists has its frequency and structure within a larger structure. Since there is a connection between everything, the existence of one depends on the effect it makes on another in a very peculiar way. This effect is more of a result when the impacted one is the source of life and existence for the One that initially caused and produced it all.”

“God belongs equally to believers and atheists, but believers “authorized” the right to the word God and its meaning. Agnostics and atheists got caught on it, although they would like to know the truth, too. Since God is the truth, atheists did not realize this yet. Once they realize it, they will become believers because they believe in truth and God is Truth. However, this does not mean that the Christian God or the God of Islam is the truth, but that the truth itself is God. The majority of believers, atheists, and agnostics would instead like to know or accept the truth rather than a stolen idea of God and lies (although many of them conceived with good intentions) presented as truth.”

“Only the real truth can serve the real purpose. If a desire or will is not represented, first and foremost, by the desire for the truth itself, then it cannot have enough power of merits to deserve real power. If we obtain the actual power, regardless of its merits correlating to the real truth, then this power is not real power but either an abuse of power, an illusion, or a simulacrum.”

“A dimension is a measure of something wrongly used as the property or feature of something, but space itself is not, in its essence, what we think it is. We imagine space, conceptually and linguistically, as something solid and conditionally emptiness if this emptiness is within something tangible as matter. In this way, all we measure is the measure of a shape that we see in the way we see it, not how it is. We can also measure distances between the shapes. This is how we form our idea of space. Even if there was no absolute vacuum, what gives space or dimensions to anything we measure or see as space in the “material universe” is this void or nothingness. We experience and measure all the physical qualities of reality, but they are only “coordinates” or informational, immaterial skeletons of Reality appearing in the forms we experience as “physical.” We measure this very void for, without it, space or our idea of space is impossible.”

“One factor that obstructs our understanding of the world is our insatiable desire to understand it at any cost. If we insist on understanding the world at any price, we will not understand it or will only partially understand it. Such an attitude is motivated more by self-promotion than a desire for fundamental understanding. If we freed ourselves from all possible chains, we would expand our views, and what we wanted to achieve at any cost could be achieved at a lower price.”

“We are still too far from the true definition of space and a true definition of fact. To prove that there is a curvature of space, we must undeniably prove and show that we know and understand what space is and that we know and understand what a fact is philosophically, linguistically, and physically. Consequently, we may say we have considered and know all this, but the “fact” remains the “fact.” It is not whether we say we understand all this and have considered all that but if we have genuinely and undeniably proved and understood what we declare.”

“We may accept the idea that natural laws govern everything in the Universe and that these laws are in some way absolute. Still, we cannot hide behind scientific laws before explaining them. According to Hawking, scientific laws may be enough for our understanding of the World. His implicit message is that the Creator is not needed. Such statements could have been valid if scientific laws were absolute and scientists, including Hawking, resolved the mystery of existence, the Universe, and the origin and future of everything. Since that is not the case, no scientist can replace the idea of the Creator just by insufficient scientific knowledge. Only a scientist or scientists (or anybody) with absolute knowledge can dethrone the Creator if there is such complete knowledge (scientific or otherwise), proving that there is nothing beyond the “point” where time stops. Unfortunately, this kind of knowledge and understanding does not yet exist. The purpose of science is not to push the Creator out of the picture but to improve, define, and redefine scientific laws in its pursuit of truth.”

“We will start with Hawking's few quotations. “The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to spacetime and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of spacetime at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for spacetime. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.” Or, in the same manner: “There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe, and what can be more special than the condition that there is no boundary?” Also, he stated, “According to the no-boundary proposal, asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless—like asking what is south of the South Pole—because there is no notion of time available to refer to. The concept of time only exists within our universe.” The “no-boundary proposal” is a classic example of a device called in Latin, Deus ex machina—God from the machine, invented by the ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides. The primary purpose of the device was to resolve the irresolvable. The question of what came before the Big Bang is not meaningless. We cannot accept that our Big Bang is the beginning of all existence. Since there is "no notion of time available to refer to," that does not mean there is nothing to refer to. This reasoning is a logical fallacy based on the idea that there should be nothing to refer to if there is no time to refer to it. This kind of reasoning falsifies reality to fit the argument. For this statement to be accurate, there must be proof that there is nothing to refer to, not "no notion of time to refer to." The lack of notion of time to refer to or its availability is not proof that there is nothing to refer to, but only that there is no notion of time to refer to and that it is not available. The lack of availability is only proof that something is not available to someone but not proof that nothing exists beyond the “point” where “time” stops. If Something, the Being, the Universal Source of Everything, is not available or approachable in any way by some particular scientist, that does not mean that the Universal Source of Everything (the Absolute) does not exist beyond the physical world. In this sense, the no-boundary proposal is a boundary proposal of a different kind. Since it is impossible to speculate about abstract concepts or ideas, such as God, Absolute, or Universal Source, it is easier to invent some trick (pardon my language), with all due respect, to compensate for the lack of understanding of the most abstract ideas and to compensate for the limitations of a frame of mind of any particular scientist or philosopher. In this case, the no-boundary proposal precisely serves the purpose of a boundary—to limit the world to the point where “time stops” and declare that there is nothing beyond because time stops there. That should mean that the laws of nature and science stop at this artificially produced boundary. But what do we have as proof that this is true? Precisely like in religions, we have words that sound seductively beautiful and convincing. Also, to a large extent, these words are supported by scientific knowledge and investigation. Yet, they are just words, and in no way do they prove that there is no immaterial Universal Source beyond the “point” where time stops.”

“To state there is no need for a creator or God if there is no time is meaningless. Because the Absolute is beyond time and space as we know them. Absolute is the Source of time and space and, therefore, does not need time to create or recreate itself through the World. Such statements are not scientific; they are presuppositions and intellectual constructs that serve as fillers for the lack of accurate understanding or a fundamental theory explaining how reality, which is almost incomprehensible to the human mind, functions.”

“There are laws of nature. We may describe the laws of nature but still not wholly unravel and understand them to pronounce that scientific laws are equal to natural laws or that they are an absolute representation of natural laws. Scientific laws did not yet cover, describe, and explain all natural laws, mysteries, and secrets.”

“We cannot hide behind science nor talk in the name of science while proclaiming statements that are not scientific. Such statements are that there is no creator if there is no time. However, this is only a statement a scientist (Stephen Hawking) uses, not a scientific argument or fact with scientific validity. The same goes for the south of the South Pole because such a statement is a logical fallacy based on the presupposition that there is nothing south of the South Pole, meaning there is absolutely nothing beyond some point of the material World, which is only a presupposition and not a scientific or natural law. Such statements may sound like analytic or logical propositions. Still, these are not analytic or logical propositions but methods or tricks to cover up the loopholes of scientific knowledge and understanding with dogmatic statements.”

“The real fight is the fight of facts among the facts, not the fight of ideas among ideas or theories among theories. More precisely, only those ideas and approaches, or only those qualities and values that represent the facts and the truth in the best possible way, have the merits that entitle them, to a larger or lesser extent, to the very same facts or truths, proportionately to their value. Since there is no absolute entitlement to the facts or truths, there can be only the entitlement, to a larger or lesser extent, to the acceptance of the values represented by particular ideas, theories, or works of art, depending on their intrinsic values that depict the facts and truths of existence and life itself in the best possible manner and with the highest level of accuracy or beauty in the arts.”

“God is, first and foremost, an idea. Nobody has the right to God, to claim God, even though people throughout ages claimed it, and probably always will be, by religion. But this God is only a stolen God, made in the human's image (the image of the human race), wearing the colors of his creators and not his own. This God wears not the colors of truth but of deceit. Deceitful simplicity is neither simplicity, truth, nor God. A stolen God is not God at all because it is, above all, an instrument of a human being in the service of a human being and not of God.”

“Atheists got so trapped that they forgot that God is not necessarily what religious books say. We have to redefine the word God to encompass everything. If God is the Creator of everything, then God is Everything. If God is Everything, then God is the truth. Why not believe in truth and refuse the partial truths sold as truth? The truth does not care about human-biased decisions and their fights or who first claimed the truth.”

“In actuality, reality is an illusion. If it were not an illusion, to some degree, it would be the “God” itself, the realization, Oneneness without the beginning or end. That would end everything because everything would transform into its primordial state of Nothingness. Ultimate reality, or Nothingness, is therefore without purpose. The purpose is created by altering the Ultimate Reality (noumenon) into the world of plurality, so the plurality itself is an “illusion” that secures purpose. Without this illusion, there is no reality in an absolute sense. The road to reality is an illusion. Thanks to this illusion, there is existence in a broader sense. Limitations are the source of movement. Without separations and limits, there would be no movement but only frozen Oneness.”

“Philosophers and scientists throughout the ages have been concerned with these questions. Still, the question is not only about posing the question but also about posing the right question and understanding the meaning of words and language. The right questions and good reasoning often lead to the correct answers, but we are dealing with how and when we establish the right concepts. Have we ever? How far are the concepts, beyond our words and language, from the intrinsic nature of what we try to describe and comprehend?”

“Regarding the old question of the mind-body relationship, the concepts related to this topic have changed from ancient times, and the difference between body and mind is more evident to us today than it was to ancient man. What changed? Was this development a result of growth in understanding or a simple paradigm shift? Is a paradigm shift always connected to growth and better understanding or not? All paradigm shifts must rely on concepts. These concepts are established based on ideas. All ideas could be better. There is a perennial fight among people about ideas, among other things. Since ideas are not easily measurable, they can be established and, based on them, the rule, regardless of their true merit. Ideas, irrespective of their intrinsic value and truth, can become the inherent values of society and may even become the “truth” itself.”

“To reach the truth, it must be at the absolute level. But does the absolute truth exist, and what does it mean? Do ideas represent truths? To what extent do ideas represent truths? These questions mostly relate to society and abstract or concrete questions concerning ethics, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Exact sciences are based on and governed by different standards and concepts of truth or ideas about the truth. Regardless of this dichotomy, it is only a dichotomy on the surface. Deep down, the absolute truth is at the equidistance from all these essential points, or all approaches, regardless of their origin (based on purely theoretical thought or conclusion resulting from an experiment), provided that all these approaches have equal merit based on the intrinsic value of any particular endeavor or approach.”