Answer to WendyDarling

Although the findings are horrific, I would be slow to lump them together with other forms of faith. There are extremists in all camps and throughout the ages even harmless groups have had their “nutters”. However, I do not intend to reduce the guilt that religion has brought upon itself.

Wendy & Bob… My apologies for barging in but…

It is possible that what we call faith is better seen in our behavior and not in our words. We have faith when we can trust that the behaviors are born out by our observations. While faith is necessary in any form of social living, even faith can be challenged by illusion or delusion. Life just isn’t that predictable even with our best wishes. Ya pay your nickel and ya take your chances. Faith follows trust, so who and what do you trust? Which “truth” is believable? Which truths aren’t believable? And so we are thrown back upon ourselves or spiral into belief, which is supercharged faith. Beliefs can bring out the very best of our human capacity - or the very worst - or both even at the same time.

Perhaps we could or should practice a bit of humility and simply say “I don’t know”. This doesn’t mean that we can’t live as a good person (mostly). Our ethics and/or morality will be governed by the time and place where we spend our lives. This has been true for a thousand generations. What we believe or have faith in may become the exact opposite in a few more generations.

Hopefully, humanity will evolve into greater benevolence and show more peaceful behaviors. But that is only well-wishing and ultimately, “I don’t know”.

but you know that you are always welcome … :wink:

I agree completely that faith and trust are connected and that in the end it is the experience that you trust to be an accurate perception of reality that you should follow. It is also something that has very much to do with the people we live with and trust. The abstract faith in something that evades my personal experience is always prone to extract the worse in me, a kind of fanaticism that is born out of insecurity. That is why people tend to get emotional when their beliefs are questioned.

In fact, saying “I don’t know” is the best way to get there. It is the assertion of non-experiential beliefs that has caused so much problems.

I have started seeing the immediate connection between spirituality and Art, whether music of any kind, painting/ drawing, poetry and stories, analogies and fables etc. It is our ability to express ourselves in the most diverse way that brings the best in us out to be seen. That is why, even if we have different views today, the ancient stories that people told themselves to explain their experience are valuable for just being that. The wisdom that has arisen over thousands of years is to be seen in the same light. It is experience that is expressed in a diversity of ways.

But at the end of the day, when you grandchild looks up to you and asks you why the world is as it is, it is better to say you don’t know, or tell a story that will help that child understand that it is okay not to know.

There is much to be learned from the ancients, particularly from those we consider to have been “prophets”. The only problem is that we can never experience their experiences. We can never live in their time and place. All must be filtered through our today experiences and that in itself becomes a new experience even though the referent is ancient. What is ancient wisdom can only be discerned through the looking glass darkly. We may take inspiration from the past but it is ever new. Quite the conundrum… And so we remain in the “I don’t know” state of being, or perhaps I should say the state of becomings. We tend to forget or ignore our own evolution and try to “fix” our notions of faith or belief. Better to see every experience as new and bring our best to the party.

As my screen name suggests, I remain… tentative. :wink:

see below … :wink:

Can faith in an ideology such as hope be included for I like this definition if that can be mentioned as well? Perhaps I’m trying too hard to combine all three elements (person, thing, ideology) into a cohesive realization of what it means to have faith in spades. Is one’s ideology the most relevant and therefore the most important aspect of not only feeling faith, but extending it beyond the confines of oneself? Exuding faith almost seems an organic characteristic or ability that some people possess naturally and others truly struggle with comprehending, let alone exuding. Personally, I attribute faith to the idea that the world is basically good but corrupted by discontent which is certainly witnessed by the callous actions of fearful people and even by some elements of tumultuous Mother Nature reinventing herself.

No, faith needn’t be religious in and of itself firstly, but secondly, faith needn’t be in any organized way at all, I agree. While we can place faith outwards onto people, objects, or ideas, it arises as an internal dialogue that one has with oneself, oft about the identity of oneself namely in being unchanged in how an artist paints the world, we, the artist, paint our world, always with our touches undetoured by the world around us.

Organized religions can be dangerous when a person’s internal dialogue and conscience is replaced or beaten down even by an unrelenting external force such as Christianity, Islam, Pagan where ideas are pressed upon a person to be accepted as if they were natural when they’re not. Some religious teachings and philosophies may align with the better qualities of humanity, but how could a religion ever know you better than yourself? Spirituality seems a more benign and open-ended self professed discussion a person can have with their own nature, letting their own truth and sensibilities guide them along through life.

As a spiritualist, what are your thoughts on having a soul? Then in terms of emotions and their powerful effects on one’s psyche, where would peace fall into place for you?

Ideologies are generally under the third kind of faith, lumped together with religions. This is because there tends to be a doctrine involved over which people at some time disagree. On the other hand, if a person embodies a kind of behaviour to the degree that I can trust them, it may be that an ideology is behind the behaviour in question and so, indirectly it may be involved. It is when an ideology is almost the object of worship that things go wrong.

It is as tentative said, it is trust that plays the biggest role. People and things that have shown themselves to be trustworthy I can have faith in. I can also have a belief that has continually shown itself to be true, but doesn’t have general acceptance, in which I can put my faith, but here we are drifting into the second category of faith (which we are bound to do).

Exuding faith can be done in all kinds of ways, in the way I lead my life and treat other people, in my habits, in my views. It can be through art, song and poetry that I express my perceptions of the world. The worst way, in my view, is when we start competing with other ideas. As I have said before, humankind has this storytelling gene that helps them make sense of things, but the stories we make up have all our perspective. Whether a cultural or geographical perspective, we have a certain way of seeing things that we can’t expect others to have, but if we listen to each others stories, we may gain a better meta-perspective. We may even gain the perspective of mother nature.

Oh definitely, our inward monologue is full of ideas of who we are in this world. It rants a bit as well, but that voice is largely our ego trying to put ourselves first. Fortunately we do have, to varying degrees it would seem, an understanding that interaction is indispensable for our wellbeing, and all attempts to only put ourselves first end tragically. Just as we cannot not communicate, we cannot not interact, which is largely communication. That is why the idea of unique ideas is really an illusion, we constantly transmit ideas and someone finally makes an idea into reality and claims to have had the original idea. So it is with all ideas.

I haven’t thought about the internal dialogue being suppressed in that way, probably because I was brought up in a certain culture that suggested that its way of explaining things was correct. I finally rebelled at twenty, when I wanted to “prove Christianity wrong, or face the consequences”, but my idea of what was wrong about Christianity was wrong itself. I found a lot of truth there, but not the way I had been taught, nor the way it is often preached today. It is very much a description from experience and tries to convey that experience in stories that install awe in the readers or, more accurately, the listeners. Of course the Bible is dated, but it still can let you travel on an adventure and have you experience that brutal reality. The trouble was that this discovery was beyond most people I spoke to. The more indoctrinated, the more difficult the conversations became. Funnily enough, when I retold the stories, I had a lot of people who were amazed at how they could come to life. They just didn’t want to accept that that is what those stories are supposed to do.

I think that some of the stories do help us to get to know ourselves better, and the fact that we are momentarily in our fantasies when we are confronted with these revelations gives us a chance to adapt better. I have been told by various people how through my story “the spirit hit them”, which is a descriptive way of saying they had such a revelation. However, it is an attribute of such stories that cause this reaction to occur, and the job of the storyteller to serve the story.

The soul is elusive. I have heard a powerful suggestion that our vegetative system is full of grey matter and could possibly transmit feelings and intuitions that are often an enhancement of our thoughts and deliberations. As to whether this has any kind of duration outside of our biological processes is something that I have yet to be convinced of. It is an idea that far more intelligent people than I have embraced but leaves me lacking a conception of how it could be sustained.

Peace is a condition that begins in the individual and is hopefully contagious. However, I have yet to experience perfect peace myself. I find that the peace I experience is the coming to terms with the “suchness” of the world and accepting that my ideas of how it “should be” are obviously not the ideas of other people. Consequently, accepting that the best experience I can have is when I feel how my wife and I harmonise, or how things come together in a way that I could hardly have hoped for. I have stood in nature, most present in Sri Lanka, and had that “multi-druple” experience of nature alive all around me.

At my age, with my body reminding me every day that it will fail sometime, such experiences are seldom perfect. Probably the best experience of peace is on my cushion, when my thoughts just pass by without disturbing me – but then my tinnitus spoils it all and it is down to accepting the “suchness” of my experience and feeling gratitude.

Hi Bob,

I suspect that it is possible that you have given up on knowing and now look to understanding. Only here can striving to “right” the world be dismissed and ego becomes irrelevant. I question perfect peace because as an animal, we struggle to obtain the means of survival, but it seems possible to obtain contentment - even if such a state of being is only temporary.

Let’s not talk about failing body (parts). Please? :laughing: #-o

Wendy,

On knowing… You know how to tie your shoe laces, right? You learned it at an early age and it was almost a test to see how bright you were. Today, there are thousands (maybe millions) of children who will never learn to tie their shoe laces. Why? VELCRO. So much for “knowing”. What we can know is both immediate and direct. Our knowing may be quite different tomorrow. We can’t stop evolving, so knowing becomes ephemeral. Better to seek understanding and that happens almost in spite of words.

Is there a soul? Well, it sounds comforting to believe that our uniqueness is perpetual but… Somehow, by some collection of circumstances, we have sentience. Isn’t that enough? In most ways, asking if there is a soul really isn’t a question because there is no answer beyond pure speculation. It is an un-question question. We can be grateful that we came into being as a human but it ends there. That came across as a bit harsh, so if you need to have a soul that’s perfectly OK.

Peace is a vital luxury that we can hold as a guest in our household.
Peace for the sake of peace, not as an escape to unpeace, but instead, a peaceful and gentle embracing of natural forces.

:smiley:

I think there is a bit of both in me, accepting the way it is doesn’t stop me trying to “right” the world around me, especially if people I care about are struggling. However, I only offer my services and I don’t force it upon people. The introvert in me is avoiding the Maschine more and more.

I think that there is a way around the Maschine, at least at present, although it seems to be finding everyone who tries to keep out of the system and drag them in. When I finally retire, I might go offline completely and revert to written letters - if there is a postal service still around. :wink: - and write on scraps of paper. At least there will be something for people to find when I’m gone … :laughing:

Dan,

Yes, embracing peace and not as an escape from un-peace. Intent is everything.

Bob,

I think it highly unlikely since there is no precedent for a Gospel of Bob. :laughing: But perhaps some sort of commentary in an obscure collection of commentaries? That might be a possible. We are but whisperers in a world of babble…

Few people will understand this. I’m impressed. Thank you.

In the beginning, there was potential that was contained, but then erupted and the emptiness was penetrated by expanding material that created the stars and planets. The diversity of these stars and planets brought forth a multitude of conditions, some of which allowed an insemination with the life germ. Over and over again, where conditions were suitable, out of seemingly inanimate material, life came forth, grew and died again. This occurred over millions of years until in one system, on our planet, where the insemination was explosive and repeatedly a vast diversity of life forms developed and became extinct, at some stage, in at least one species, sentience grew.

This was an ultimate development. A species that was led by sensation and consciousness, and began to understand its surroundings and seek meaning in its life. Mankind could adapt to varying conditions, and developed a collective intent by which he was able to change the conditions under which he lived, but he lived and suffered under his duality and sought the singularity. Their sentience was beleaguered by their carnal origins, and for millennia they struggled with this awareness. Here and there, now and then they found peace, but following generations took it for granted and it was lost again…

The beginning of my Gospel … :-k

I could easily be wrong, but isn’t the beginning also the end? The fuss and furor of each generation is different, but always the same song, different verse. A two paragraph epistle that sums it all up. Get it carved in stone. It will last longer - not in “progress”, but in understanding.

Good work, Bob.

Thanks, I have also wondered whether it stays in a never ending loop, until resources run out or somebody decides annihilation is the best way out. The “good news” is hardly that, but that the potential of sentience, although strained and handled roughly, is still there. It is a potential that only a few will use wisely, and others will suffer by it.

I tend to think of “all” as field and focus, probably because of my Taoist leanings. From the mystery of the field (universe) comes focus - creation. From what little we have learned of the universe, it is observable that things (including humans) come into being from the field and then over time, return to the field. Stars are born and die. Sure, it may take a few million years or perhaps a couple billion years but who is counting? In this sense, sentience becomes a subset, not the end all be all. It’s quite possible that sentience has or will arise hundreds or thousands of times as part of the constant cosmic dance.

Against this backdrop, we are left with making this life, in this time, as benevolent as possible both personally and in community. This in no way provides sentience with purpose, but you gotta start somewhere…

I’m re-reading tao te ching, and im on chapter 50.

Purpose is part of higher evolution/development.
A successful philosopher knows who and what he is, what and where things should be done, and why.

Thats right, your field is my emptiness, and there is a coming and going of all things, into sight and out if sight, but that is all we have for a brief moment. The emptiness seems to be devoid of any concept of time, and it is our sentience that makes us struggle with transience, that look back at a fleeting experience. On the other hand, that is why people who can look back try to impress on younger people that they must try to make the best out of what they have, whilst they can – “the greatest good for the biggest number” seems to be the goal that does the most to promote benevolence.

And it is also right, we have to start somewhere … if we care about those that follow.

I hope Wendy got what she needed from this thread even though we sorta wandered a bit - but not really. What is faith and/or belief has all the limitations of borders and boundaries that are only a small part of our potential sentience.

Dan,

Peace is a vital luxury that we can hold as a guest in our household.

Why do you call peace a guest?

Did you mean to say *not as an escape from unpeace?

That sounds more to me like “acceptance” than peace. Is there always peace within acceptance?