"We can't at all, beyond maybe the rough guess that a very high level being probably wouldn't interact with any of us directly."
My apologies, I don't mean to be contrary for its own sake, and I am sorry if that is how I come across. That said, I have no idea how one would calculate the probabilities! Gods could interact with us all the time and we might just be too dense to realize it. For instance, if we are in a rainstorm, are we not interacting with Zeus directly as he rains? If we plough the earth do we not interact with Demeter? If we perform a tragic part in a theatrical production, might we not interact directly with with Dionysus and the Muses? If I kayak I interact directly with the body of water, and I could imagine a similar scenario with other cosmogonic streams of being.
My point is that it seems to me that you conflate "awareness of direct interaction" with "direct interaction" itself. If we understand the gods as the principles that create the cosmos, one could say without irony that humans interact directly with the gods as much as we interact with the cosmos!
Of course, there is the question then of _conversing_ with a god as a friend. That, though, is a very different question than direct interaction itself.
In this larger conversation, I see that there are a bunch of different mental models going on mostly unstated and unspecific without precise terminology. My larger point is that we humans don't appear to know from direct experience anything much beyond our mental models. We can argue for internal consistency within our mental model, but I tend to think that the living reality of divinity exceeds our human capacity to understand it.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2022-08-12 05:06 pm (UTC)My apologies, I don't mean to be contrary for its own sake, and I am sorry if that is how I come across. That said, I have no idea how one would calculate the probabilities! Gods could interact with us all the time and we might just be too dense to realize it. For instance, if we are in a rainstorm, are we not interacting with Zeus directly as he rains? If we plough the earth do we not interact with Demeter? If we perform a tragic part in a theatrical production, might we not interact directly with with Dionysus and the Muses? If I kayak I interact directly with the body of water, and I could imagine a similar scenario with other cosmogonic streams of being.
My point is that it seems to me that you conflate "awareness of direct interaction" with "direct interaction" itself. If we understand the gods as the principles that create the cosmos, one could say without irony that humans interact directly with the gods as much as we interact with the cosmos!
Of course, there is the question then of _conversing_ with a god as a friend. That, though, is a very different question than direct interaction itself.
In this larger conversation, I see that there are a bunch of different mental models going on mostly unstated and unspecific without precise terminology. My larger point is that we humans don't appear to know from direct experience anything much beyond our mental models. We can argue for internal consistency within our mental model, but I tend to think that the living reality of divinity exceeds our human capacity to understand it.