Do you remember looking out at the stars at night, thinking about the scale of it all, and that it went on forever, and it was all so utterly uncontrollable and so threatening that you recoiled in fright, and couldn’t keep thinking about it?
All children, I think, do that at some point.
That’s fear.
Have you ever, since, done the same thing, but without the desire to control it, and instead just glory in being a part of it?
That’s belonging.
Religion doesn’t work because it desires to control people and things.
To render God understood.
That’s modern.
Taoism is a means to an end. No more, no less.
Look at things in a certain way, and your life clicks into life.
It’s that simple.
Too easy to consider.
Laughable!
Yet Westerners do to it what they do to everything else: bury it beneath layer upon layer of interpretation, complexity and glitz.
Christianity could easily recover and assume its former place in Western life, if its clergy could abandon all the mumbo-jumbo that goes along with it.
It is a means to an end.
Do this, and this, look at things like this, and this, and your life works.
It is a way to make your life work.
I really have to wonder at people, sometimes.
What is their problem!
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“Christianity could easily recover and assume its former place in Western life, if its clergy could abandon all the mumbo-jumbo that goes along with it”
What exactly do you mean by “mumbo-jumbo” ?
I hope you are not referring to reduce all things spiritual tu some simplistic, mystical and emotional “intuition”, deprived of any doctrine (understood in its higher sense).
Of course, all spiritual doctrines are means to an end, and that is spiritual realization. But while not ends in themselves, they are still necessary as means.
I prefer the idea of trusting intuition itself. Any religious truth should be discoverable by the individual if guided by a few principles. Despite having a lot of “doctrine,” our churches collapsed into Jesus-loves-you and everyone’s equal.
What if intuition is the wrong concept?
What if it is not intuition at all, but something far more basic?
What if you really are ‘created in God’s image’?
As you’re fond of saying, language is tricky. It’s possible that what I’m calling intuition is in fact some connection to the divine. Sometimes, I think my brain is only an elaborate antenna. However, I’m too cynical to ever really think that. For me, life is a brief struggle and then we become decaying meat. If consciousness survives it is in the form of consciousness itself, not personal immortality. For that reason, I see intuition as merely a reflection of the universe in the shaping of my brain and its instincts. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you. I am really happy to see your articles appearing here with more regularity on religious and thus traditionalist topics. Without this, the blog gets too Republican for me and misses out on the really big point, which is whether or not we believe there is some intelligent or logical order to life itself.
Consciousness, as I have experienced it, is a launching out into forever. It exists beyond space and time, and far beyond the physical.
Is there a logical, intelligent order to life?
Maybe we need to ask ourselves if that even matters?
Life is. It is. No matter what we think of it, or understand of it. Stepping out of social-consciousness, we notice there is wonder, and nothing-but wonder.
I have a saying that I sometimes use as a signature:
“Leap boldly into the void.
You will not be harmed.
It has not bottom.”
Oops: thats ‘no bottom’, instead of ‘not bottom’ :)
Logical to me means that it has a self-consistent internal logic. It doesn’t mean a human logic. It doesn’t mean material logic. Stepping out of social-consciousness is the best idea ever. Human logic is a twisted form of self-defense and self-aggrandizement. I don’t trust it.
You are right :)
What’s to trust?
Only Reality.
And yet, humans are just as much product of the universe as the stars…
Indeed they are.
Yet humans do to the universe what nothing else does: they look at it, interpret it, ‘understand’ it, and in so doing, turn it into something it never was, as if the way they render it, is the way it is.
“humans do to the universe what nothing else does”
It would be true if man were a pinnacle of the world.
“Sometimes, I think my brain is only an elaborate antenna.”
That happens to me too. And it isn’t just a feeling: I learned about some of my ideas that came to my mind, that they had been developed in a different country, and there was no way of getting them in a regular way. And it’s unlikely a coincidence, because these ideas were out of scope of my interests.
“If consciousness survives”
If consciousness is a process of receiving information by this “antenna”, then its source survives as it belongs to the whole, and almost doesn’t depend on “antennas”. “Almost” because “antennas” belong to the whole. As you’ve said, no personal immortality.
“I see intuition as merely a reflection of the universe”
But our reason, rationality, abstract thinking – all these are also reflection of the Universe. The Universe is shaping our brains not only for instincts, but for everything.
Humanity to a degree represents a design process by the universe. However humans are in flux, a work in progress. If we are antennas, it doesn’t necessarily have bearing on personal immortality. The differentiation could have occurred before we as individuals appeared here. I’m just cynical on this issue and tend to think of consciousness as a great pool lurking behind the visible, and we get little doses of it sometimes.
“However humans are in flux, a work in progress.”
Also the Universe, not only humans. Their separation from the Universe is a trick of language, not a physical reality.
“I’m just cynical on this issue and tend to think of consciousness as a great pool lurking behind the visible, and we get little doses of it sometimes.”
I understand it the same way; but why it suppose to be cynical? It agrees with the notions of the holographic universe, the fractal universe, the apparent self-similarity of the world, come statements of the Bible, etc.
It’s cynical because some individual personalities are beautiful and should be eternal.
Mihai, are you interpreting what you read as something you already know? What if you don’t already know it, and the interpretation is a misinterpretation? What if what you read is a rendering of something so simple, so innate, that it never got your attention before?
What if?
Well, I don’t know how exactly to interpret it, because it can be interpreted in many ways, so that’s why I am asking YOU- the author- for details.
@A.Realist: Christianity is a particular case, whose problems I have acknowledged elsewhere. My concern here is what I fear is the danger of falling into simplistic fallacies. Which is why I need more details.
Well. Details are probably the last thing anybody needs.
Too many details have led us to where we are.
Sorry: can’t help there :)
Religion fails, in its adherence to details, and to ‘understanding’, as if the subject were a mind-thing. And it isn’t.
It’s an eye, introspection, quietude, solitary thing.
A stillness-awareness thing.
No sense can be made of the world without this ability, that our ancestors had, but that has been buried, in us, in modernity.
As you may have noticed, it is difficult to write about something that can not be written about. In the same way it is difficult to ‘understand’ something that can not be ‘understood’. I wish us all good fortune.
The problem is that our concepts of any thing are external to that thing.
During a conversation on religion, we’re already talking about an interpretation or representation of spirituality, that we have encoded into language or ritual.
In this way, details can lead us astray. It may be that what we really need is just clear agreement on what our language means.
‘Spirituality’, as I see it, is an observing, a union, and a reverence for ‘what-is’. A dealing-directly with reality.
Whereas ‘religion’, again, as I see it, is an abstraction, an interpretation, of what-is, rather than what-is-as-it-is.
Sorry for all the hyphens, but they aim to tie words together into concepts that they wouldn’t otherwise convey.
That’s exactly true. The problem is that most people aren’t about to figure out anything much on their own. Religion is good for guidance of the normal people.
Normal people need laws, more than religion.
Laws that don’t change every five minutes.
Religious laws, without the religion.
Along the lines of the Ten Commandments.
Simple, clear, effective.
One of the basic ideas of traditionalism is that tradition itself guides religion, law and society. They even call some crimes “ten commandments” crimes because they’re the obvious rape, murder, et cetera.
It’s good to proceed cautiously and with full knowledge. I’m hearin’ you there.
I don’t think so hard, I just trust in the universe to be good.
That’s the spirit. It really is.
Oh? Interpretation takes you away from the Tao?
Interpretation takes you away from reality.
Western ‘taoists’ generally interpret taoism as a left-wing ideology.
The same applies to Christianity.
I once heard a Christian claim that God was a Christian.
I find the mangle that humans so often run reality through, to be utterly incomprehensible.
Taoism invites non-interpretation of reality. This is something that requires practice. Once one is practiced at non-interpretation, the world becomes what it always actually was, but remained undetected, to the interpreting mind: exciting, rich, varied and perfect.
Any “Western” interpretation at this point is going to be tainted with leftism. The problem is what ferret brought up in another comment, which is that while gut instinct and reality are good things to have, if you want to organize a society you will have to use some kind of externalized ideology. Sort of like how at some point you need strong central leadership, but the challenge is keeping strong leadership without the trappings of tyranny that make everyday life bad.
Are you truly living in accordance with the Tao, if you’re not interpretative?
Frankly I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not I am living in accordance with the tao in anybody else’s eyes.
I am sure, also, that if the tao was able to care, it wouldn’t care either, what I did or how I did it.
I do what I do, live as I live, am as I am.
And apparently it works.
Why does it work?
Because I am no longer influenced by my mind.
I use it as I see fit, and do not allow it to use me.
And I see, only too well, and only too often, the mess a mind can make of people who are undisciplined.
Apparently.
Esoteric belief systems are like gateways, not standards. It’s not easy to explain, but the idea is that you figure out a heuristic and apply it yourself, and over time you reach the goal.
Still, what did you mean by “mumbo-jumbo”? I have the same question.
I can’t speak for the author. Extensive reliance on external systems of dogma replaces an actual connection to the idea as it exists in reality. The result is an increasing formalization, deconstruction and distancing from actuality. This is a huge theme in Zen and Taoism, as well as postmodern thought.
“Mumbo Jumbo”:
…the rituals of a religion the speaker does not believe in performed in a language that the speaker does not understand.
Wikipedia.
…Unnecessary fluff that serves to confuse and invite ridicule, rather than clarify and invite reverence.
Crow.
Rituals are the very foundation of spirituality. “Ritual” is derived from a sanskrit word that means “order”, as a reference to Divine order. Ritual is something that has everything to do with something “technical” and nothing to do with superstition or mysticism.
Even though the majority of religious rituals have fallen into empty superstitions, it doesn’t mean that true rituals don’t have any place.
Nietzsche said we killed God and higher morals by separating them from reality. Living rituals (tradition) are a good thing.
Disagree entirely.
Rituals are the PC of religion. and the display of an empty spirituality.
The ritual becomes the whole point, thus eliminating the whole point.
The whole point is to render a life liveable, in the most satisfying way. A life that ‘works’.
I can only speak with authority upon my own life.
I dispense with the ‘show’, and become the thing, itself.
Becoming, not ritual, is what spirituality is about.
I would prefer never to act-as-if-I-am-spiritual.
I am spiritual.
After a moment of consideration, I have this to offer:
The only valid ritual a human actually has, is the act of breathing.
In-out, in-out. Who is aware, consciously, of this process?
Almost no Westerners.
In: making use of creation.
Out: a giving back to creation.
Plant life is the perfect counterpoint to humans:
While humans take in oxygen and give back carbon dioxide, plants take in carbon dioxide and give back oxygen.
We need to have a whole lot more respect for plant life than we currently have.
Breathing, alone, is the way to health, balance, and a life that works. In other words: consciousness.
No other ritual is necessary, unless to give an ‘appearance’.
You are confusing ritual with empty gesture. Two entirely different things.
I think the misunderstanding here is that the point of ritual is to induce a sense of the spiritual. If one wanders from the spiritual life, one can re-acquaint themselves with the rituals to find their way back. Also, some rituals will be more “involved” than others.
No. I am understanding ritual as what people do, where I happen to be. And that is empty gesture and fake for show. I do not allow ‘confusion’ to intrude.
Ritual in the true (not fake) sense, exists not at all in the West, and so I am unable to comment upon it.
Then where you live you are not seeing ritual.
I think that the core problem here is that people have become to think of ritual as synonymous with “ceremony”, which is completely false.
Ceremony is sometimes necessary as a means to an end, but ritual is independent to it.
Quite simply, ritual, taken from its etymological root, means an action performed in accordance with order, that is with the Divine, universal laws.
Ritual, as order, makes sense.
Anything contrived, as a show, does not.
It is interesting to consider the differences between ritual and ceremony. I imagine the distinction has largely been lost, as so many distinctions have.
So much, these days, is purely for appearance.
Ritual is practice (“the way”/”do” in words like “bushido”) and not a display.
Ritual is one of the instruments to render a life livable.
Well, maybe western christianity has perverted the idea of rituals so all you have seen is “show”.
Rituals as i understand them are quite similar to army service, martial arts, etc. They help to develop discipline and modesty and dim the ego.
Also, they keep life systematic, periodical as contrsted to the chaotic liberal life.
Yep.
Seems like you weren’t “interpreting what you read as something you already know”… =)
I’d rather they did church services in Latin. Most of the words don’t matter, the mood does. Especially for children.
Absolutely agree here. A mood is a more unifying notion and it induces people in a way that words and instructions never can. I just read this little bit of Plato and it’s about how putting all your trust in words and books actually makes you feeble-minded, because you rely on your own mind less. Your mood on the other hand, goes wherever you go, it’s always there. So ideally, the mood of church service is going to induce a certain temperate in a child that they carry with themselves their whole life that will serve them just as well, or perhaps even better than any literal, specific instructions.
You’re too sane, by half, you are.
Thankyou Crow for these discourses.
Crow: Consciousness, as I have experienced it, is a launching out into forever. It exists beyond space and time, and far beyond the physical.
Modernity = Slavery: I don’t think so hard, I just trust in the universe to be good.
Crow: That’s the spirit. It really is.
Except when you jump into a Black Hole. The universe is not in harmony, and hey, can anyone call it “good” unless they are so cosmically-challenged they submit to it?
The idea that ‘if only I embrace the outer universe will it resonate and make a home in me and bring peace’ is the wrong way around. The universe should shout with your awakening.
“Leap boldly into the void. You will not be harmed. It has no bottom.” http://www.woodka.com/2009/02/26/bring-everything-with-you/
This was not the leap Jesus taught: whoever dies to their imprint of the world, will regain their insight. Tao is that imprint of the Universe as much as Islam is the imprint of an External God.
Their external became their internal and they became antennas. (Tools).
Tao, is a flat-earth mysticism: ‘To have substance you must have nothing, to have good you must have evil, to have female you must have male.’
Pop psychology.
Even worse is when it was applied to science and medicine.
Traditional Chinese Ying-Yang medicine killed more than it cured. That application of the Tao onto the mind body and soul for a harmonious neutrality that did not exist. http://www.skepticblog.org/2008/11/02/tcm-1/
It only makes the dead think they are alive.
To be full of identity but nothing, good but wise as a serpent, female but understanding male, is about wholesomeness and not about worship of a Divine Eternal Separation revolving around each other in perpetuity.
Tao lead a person to fatalism and just flowing in a river beyond their control. The Chinese made little progress in science and a lot of progress in enslaving people. Rather than being ‘balanced’ as they claimed they were, they were easily infected with the repression of Dynasties, Christianity and today by Communism.
If anyone asks of you to make a leap of faith, dismemeber their fallacies with rationalism until they admit they don’t know what they were trying to get you to leap into. Then leave them in their ‘happy place’ to dwell on whether such a place exists.
I don’t know what you were trying to say.
I could make no sense of it.
But the feeling I get is you imagine I do what I do, and am what I am, for me.
And that is misinterpretation.
I have found a way that works.
Almost as a by-product of a mystical search for truth.
I care not one whit if the universe harms me, or kills me, in passing.
I choose to revere it because it is the universe, and I am insignificant. Even while being a part of it. I do not count.
It is not, was never, and never will be, about me.
You are correct crow. It was never about you.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you
bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is
within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
It I had come with Wonder of the Universe, I could enter the house of some; the Wonder of Jesus I could enter the homes of many; that one has the wonder of the child within, means only those with their child within can come.
Does your God need an interpreter?
Are His works not enough, as they are?
Who can be His spokesperson?
My God doesn’t need anything at all.
It is, after all, God: It does not have needs.
It does not require me to spread It’s Holy Word.
Reverence for It, alone, suffices.
Hi Crow,
Does your God need an interpreter?
I am but one temple, why would I need an interpreter of my purposes? I am but one neuron away.
Those who follow The External are an ‘instruction’ away.
The first reads the binary code the other the ‘mark up’ language.
One is ‘what you are is what you are’, the other is what you see is what you are.
I do not know the universe, because I know I have not seen it.
You claim to have seen it and It is part of you.
Are His works not enough, as they are?
Whose ‘works’ do you talk about? The explosion that made the universe? The sun that made the earth? The volcano that made the rock? The DNA that made the animal? The child that made the toy?
Do not the ants shape and reconstruct their world? Do they worry and leave the fields to dance around a sacred pole until their are no trees to cut down? Those who claim to be a spokesperson for a Deity outside themselves?
“My God doesn’t need anything at all… Reverence for It, alone, suffices.”
Need I say more?
No need.
You are better than me.
May it bring you joy.
Hi Crow,
I’ve done my best to explain that nothing, absolutely nothing has it to identify with or attach to, because our senses are so limited. No Definition of God and no Definition of The Universe. Nothing. Nobody knows.
You defined your awe of the universe, it’s huge magnificence of expanse, (just as a tribe once saw the seathing marshes or angry rain-clouds with wonder and trepidation), and then turned it around into the submission of worship, that is, we should all be part of an Eternal Tao.
Do you remember looking out at the stars at night, thinking about the scale of it all, and that it went on forever, and it was all so utterly uncontrollable and so threatening that you recoiled in fright, and couldn’t keep thinking about it?
All children, I think, do that at some point.
That’s fear.
Have you ever, since, done the same thing, but without the desire to control it, and instead just glory in being a part of it?
That’s belonging.
From fear to queer; like that sexual-submission to a violator turn to worship, to complete immersion to a new identity.
And now all the children must be educated about ‘It’. The Truth.
As another Taoist wrote:
When the good man hears of the Tao, he practices it assiduously When a mediocre man hears of the Tao, he neither believes nor disbelieves When a contemptible man hears of the Tao, he laughs it to scorn But the Tao that could not be thus ridiculed is not the Eternal Tao. http://boardreader.com/thread/The_Gospel_of_Tao_w0maX24qguoyjpgfpc.html
The circular argument presented by every other Eternal Deity Worshipper.
You are better than me. May it bring you joy
Yep. That’s the spirit behind this.
I don’t deal in evidence or proofs. http://achildcansee.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/worshiping-the-external/#comments
Yep. That argument of Psychics and Fortune Tellers.
My interest is not in you Crow, but what comes out presented here as reality.
Thank goodness for apostates.
Islam has http://www.faithfreedom.org/
Homosexuals have http://narth.com/
Blacks have http://www.amessagetoblackpastors-mdc.blogspot.co.uk/
Tao has… oh I forgot “But the Tao that could not be thus ridiculed is not the Eternal Tao”
Another mind of the child dies.
As an adult another one of their Traditional Chinese Medicine patients dies. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1254746/Chinese-medicine-caused-kidney-failure-cancer-So-safe-popular-cures.html
Do you do anything else, other than ridicule, undermine, and seek to ruin? It would be good to have something creative and constructive to engage in, rather than what you are currently doing.
Taoism, since you completely fail to ‘get it’, is nothing at all to do with China or the Chinese.
That Lao Tzu happened to be born thereabouts, is neither here nor there. The only connection is his description of what was failing in his corner of the world. He wrote what he wrote, and like all sages, disappeared from mortal ken. I don’t blame him.
By your own logic, Christianity serves only to glorify Israel and Jews. It has become difficult to take you seriously.
If reality is what interests you, start defining it, for yourself. You’re never going to find it by ripping apart somebody else’s.
By your own logic, Christianity serves only to glorify Israel and Jews.
“The Gospel…is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile” (Rom 1:16)
I don’t know where you got that impression.
You’re never going to find it by ripping apart somebody else’s.
That is the point Crow, I am ripping up the fantasy so it is not palmed of as real.
The Fascist worships his Nation, the Communist her State, the Tao its Universe.
I have observed across the world this one fact: The dream becomes the nightmare.
Now, if you has said, ‘how amazing it is that out of millons of sperm many Near Extinction Events and random chances so that we are actually communicating… what’s the probability in that!’ I would agree and appreciate the fragileness of all life.
But to concoct a pseudo-conection with the Universe?… a dangerous ideology of the fates.
Like a person wearing a tattoo. Asked why they did, the reasons are conveyed in rational arguments, but with probing reduces down to personal edification, to a disatisfaction with what they were born with. In return for the symbol they received a comfort. However, this wears off and more tattoos are required. The tattoo artist becomes the king-maker… as is the drug-pusher, the priest, the prostitute.
So too this conversation has reduced. It has to, to be meaningful. Every debate with Believers has reduced to ‘victim me’. They have swapped the kingdom within for a Kingdom without.
So of course it hurts. It’s meant to hurt. To suggest to someone to let go of life itself.
No one wants that. Such infilling-love connection with The Devine. But it is only your projection.
So I warn others not to get into it. Better not to start. Those on Opium may not ever leave. I have no desire that others become allies as smoking leads to cannabis leads to stronger and stronger opiates.
You have kindly permitted me to dispute your assertions of Worship. Many may feel a tug to protect and rescue you from this cruel writer. Some may wonder what is that is in them that calls to one of its own.
There is the red pill and the blue pill. And then there’s no pill.
Well. I wonder if you are finished now, saving the world from the awful crow. Job done. Mission accomplished. Go to heaven and have fun.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have a difficult world to deal with, and I hope to share what I have learned, with others, towards that end.
I plan to write, soon, about the notion of ‘therapy’, but in a way never before undertaken.
What I have to offer really doesn’t need to be The Ultimate Truth, does it? Even if it is, it doesn’t need to be. What it needs to be, is of some practical use, to the living, as a means of navigating a society that no longer lives.
Christianity has thoroughly bombed, in that regard. It is worse than useless, in current times. It has become nothing but a laughing-stock, and as sad as that is, it is the way it is.
So we must seek something that actually works, rather than something that doesn’t, and hasn’t, for a very long time.
Without destroying the good.
Without embracing the bad.
I’m not sure I agree that crow is a dualist, if that’s what you’re arguing.
I am a rather large fan of adualism. It’s a simple philosophy that rapidly becomes complex.
In it, thought and matter share a common precursor state.
There is no metaphysical versus physical. There is only the world as information and reality. They are not dual as opposites, but simultaneous.
I understand your anger. There are many fake people out there of all stripes. I met my first fake Taoism and fake Zen masters in the 1980s. But not everyone who finds inspiration in these philosophies is that way.
I keep wanting to be religious. I think religious people lead happier lives, and have more energy for what they enjoy in this life. I think all religions are roughly the same, if you interpret them correctly. That is to say that we have the same world, and the same heavens, so we’ve either figured it out more or less, or we haven’t. All religions are like specialized vocabularies to describe it, as is philosophy, as is science.
The real deal is probably so far abstracted that our puny little methods of trying to figure it out are like children drawing nuclear bomb plans in sidewalk chalk.
I think part of the idea here is that rationalism is derived from fallacies of material appearance, and thus can mislead us about what is purely informational.
I guarantee you this — this is the famous Brett Stevens “money back” guarantee — that whatever Jesus Christ, Arjuna and William Blake saw in the universe that led them to believe in its absolute divinity and infinity is the same thing referenced in the Tao.
Different approaches. As you know, I’m a big fan of keeping things “local” as far as our influences. I don’t think the knowledge in the Tao is new to the West. In fact, I think it exists in Plato as well as other ancient sources.
It’s best we not get ensnared by vocabulary as we try to find meaning. Unfortunately, it too easily happens. The Tao describes a truth, and the Western mysticism describes a truth, and since that truth is from the same world is is probably different faces of the same underlying truth.
Was that clear? No, not really. Language is tricky. Glad you and crow have started one of the more interesting dialogues we’ve had on this site.
It’s not so much ‘interesting’ as entirely unnecessary.
The way of things, aka; reality, is unaffected by who says what, or who thinks what. Humans in their egotism create ‘truth’ in their own heads, and adhere to it like a drowning man a straw.
Truth is staring anybody and everybody in the face, 24/7, their whole lives, and who but humans could fail to detect it?
The way of things is simple and obvious: too obvious and too simple to notice.
We live until we don’t live.
Life is to be lived.
All is mysterious, and is meant to be.
The mystery is life.
Any questions?
[...] Crow: Consciousness, as I have experienced it, is a launching out into forever. It exists beyond space and time, and far beyond the [...]
It’s a shame, really that Christians stopped being God’s representatives, and instead, began using God to represent them.
This is what happens with all human failures: the tool becomes the master, and the human starts projecting instead of receiving.
“It’s a shame, really that Christians stopped being God’s representatives, and instead, began using God to represent them.”
I really like this line. It truly reveals the nature of religious exclusivism.
@ ferret
“It would be true if man were a pinnacle of the world.”
He doesn’t have to be. He just has to be the highest-IQ species on the planet right now.
Pinnacle is a human term. It implies man as an epic character, beautiful, pure of heart, etc. Reality is more forgiving.
We were talking in the scale of the universe. It is possible there are other planets with the higher-IQ species.
But, even on this planet, we have species that most likely perceive men as a manifestation of the nature, not a higher form of life. Perhaps they believe they have a highest IQ in the world.
Similarly, we may mistake a higher forms of life for a natural events. Just because of the limitations of our senses and lack of imagination.
Hi Crow,
“Well. I wonder if you are finished now, saving the world from the awful crow…”
I have only argued for saving the world from awful ideologies. The separation of mind and soul. These are known by their fruit of poverty, starvation and willing domination by beasts just for the sense of heightened blamelessness and piety it achieves.
And yes, thank you, I have finished on the topic of Worship. :) !!!!!!!!!!!
If a person asked “at what age do you think a child should learn the True Religion?” I would reply, “the child was born with the True Religion, and knows more than every word in your Bible and more than you could ever know!”
That is my proposition, and anyone who corrupt that child from growing naturally to instill fear, will feel my boot.
‘How your mind can keep you well’ is a wonderful gift and you say you will offer a book for enlightenment. I would buy any such book that would help people become wholey again. I wish you strength, love and insight in this venture.
Brett,
I’m not sure I agree that crow is a dualist, if that’s what you’re arguing.
I have no such personal assumptions. Only about Worship: the moving away from wonder and enquiry, to embracing a life not their own. A forest-fire can make one person become forever afraid of matches, another to remember not to camp out in the peak of summer as forest-fires are a natural ecological occurrence.
I am a rather large fan of adualism. It’s a simple philosophy that rapidly becomes complex.
In it, thought and matter share a common precursor state.
I have no idea what that is! My interest is piqued and I’m one click away from your works under that name.
I understand your anger. There are many fake people out there of all stripes.
Not anger, but urgency. The signs of serious troubles are ahead. A head in the sand will not help.
I keep wanting to be religious. I think religious people lead happier lives, and have more energy for what they enjoy in this life.
A child has no religion and they are full of energy and happiness. This is how we are made. I can’t improve on the design.
I think all religions are roughly the same, if you interpret them correctly.
That’s impossible, I can’t even interpret what I wrote five weeks ago correctly!
That is to say that we have the same world, and the same heavens, so we’ve either figured it out more or less, or we haven’t. All religions are like specialized vocabularies to describe it, as is philosophy, as is science.
And yet the ‘wordless word’ a dog, cat or donkey have been putting up with, for over 6000 years living within all The Holy Religions of Man, to testify to their veracity or not.
The real deal is probably so far abstracted that our puny little methods of trying to figure it out are like children drawing nuclear bomb plans in sidewalk chalk.
If we heal minds, the religions will vanish and the ‘wordless word’ return to us. Jesus called it ‘the kingdom of god’
Thank you again Crow, for providing this Worship forum and letting me add to the mix of ideas. I assure you it was not personal and you have added to my Pokemon Experience Points.
I wonder in what way you feel your ‘belief’ serves you better than mine serves me, my wife, my animals, birds, plants, trees, insects, and landscape?
For my ‘belief’ is in no way a belief. It is the way that works. And, as I have said: not just for me. My description of the way, is the only way I have ever found, in more than half a century of searching, for a way that does work.
It works.
Can you honestly say that ‘your way’ works nearly as well, for you?
Until you can say, that what you think you know does more good than mine does harm, to anyone exposed to it, you would do far better to humble yourself to what you seem to have no concept of, until you can see it for what it is.
And it is, in it’s simplest terms, this:
Do not desire.
Do not force.
Do not seek to understand.
Do not make comparisons.
Do not ruin your own life, or the lives of others.
Do not eat of the forbidden fruit.
“I have only argued for saving the world from awful ideologies.”
This blog is about traditions, culture, ecology, honesty, but all that without
“ideology” – it is a bad word here, especially in connection with politics, social classes, etc.
I hope to see my comment in italics :)
Hi Crow,
I leave the subject on reasonable terms and them you come out with this:
And it is, in it’s simplest terms, this:
Do not desire.
Do not force.
Do not seek to understand.
Do not make comparisons.
Do not ruin your own life, or the lives of others.
Do not eat of the forbidden fruit.
You’re back with memory-games again.
There are no rules to consciousness. You live freely. You can choose to:
Desire.
Force.
Seek to understand.
Make comparisons.
Ruin your own life, or the lives of others.
Eat of the forbidden fruit.
Because it was right for the moment. You walk the narrow way between the two.
Only those with two healthy functioning brain hemispheres can see this.
Some are blinded by trauma to the left-brain so it cannot instruct the right- brain to not identify and be absorbed with the Whole Universe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU (Exellent video of a psychologist experiencing a stroke in her left brain which reveals to her the hope of the Tao)
Others who were intimidated (by those with brain damage), then do it to themselves.
There is nothing reasonable about you.
And nothing conscious.
A Christian does not recommend eating forbidden fruit, or ruining lives. I don’t know what turned you into what you have lately become, but I recommend you look into treatment.
Meanwhile, be civil or be gone.
The discussion – for want of a better word – here, has shown some interesting things.
That the mind, undisciplined, can become a voracious destroyer of things, rendering an intelligent man into a monster.
Because the mind is a reducing-engine.
It is able to take infinite possibilities and reduce them to a single solution.
This is problem-solving, and is the main function of the mind.
Problem-solving permits the making of decisions that best serve the desired outcome. It is a creative process to fulfil desire.
But what if there is no problem to solve?
The undisciplined mind rules with an iron fist.
It chews and chews and chews…
And ends up creating infinite problems it can solve.
This may be seen as madness.
The reducing-engine is a worthy tool, for life is filled with problems that require solving, as long as a desire for outcomes exists.
Taoism is about minimizing desires.
Reduce desire, and the mind has less work to do.
It may then idle, and contemplate reality, leaving the soul to soar where it will.
Resulting in a state of clarity, balance, and content.
The Western world has succumbed to its own mind, encouraged to become a God, and placed upon a pedestal. A golden-calf, carried on high, by each and every member. The graven image of ego.
This ego can do nothing but destroy, while feeling smugly superior in its omnipotence. Incapable of error. Incapable of objectivity. Incapable of reason.
All of this has parallels in The Bible. In every Holy Book. It is a phenomenon as old as the human race. The abuse of man’s greatest tool, to engineer his own downfall.
Minimize ego. Minimize desire. Minimize thought. Increase life!
Hi Crow,
The discussion – for want of a better word – here, has shown some interesting things.
Observation: Lack of objectivity.
Diagnosis: Right-brain dominant, left-brain suppressed.
Present solution: left brain is given a list of can and cannot dos.
That the mind, undisciplined, can become a voracious destroyer of things, rendering an intelligent man into a monster.
That is the definition of uncontrolled right-brain chatter. A person feeling distressed that desire has taken control over them. A life lived by compulsion.
Because the mind is a reducing-engine.
It is able to take infinite possibilities and reduce them to a single solution.
The mind can hold two solutions, not just one, choosing both simultaneously for a decision.
This is problem-solving, and is the main function of the mind.
This is looking for a single solution. A singularity. The Fascist holds one, a Communist holds the other.
The Frontal Cortex, the decision maker is in-formed by both fully-functioning brain hemispheres.
Problem-solving permits the making of decisions that best serve the desired outcome. It is a creative process to fulfil desire.
There is no desire. Desire is to fulfil what is lacking, to make whole what is not whole.
A brain scan of a Buddhist Monk reveals the meditation effect on their brains for a sense of a left brain and then reverts to right brain dominance afterwards. In other words, a Junkie looking for a sense of peace. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/12/17/article-0-0C84C1BD000005DC-909_634x440.jpg
Meditation is abused to sublimate desire but only for a moment, and is returned to again and again.
But what if there is no problem to solve?
The undisciplined mind rules with an iron fist.
It chews and chews and chews…
Yes, a good description. The right-brain just chatters and chatters away.
And ends up creating infinite problems it can solve.
Yes. it tries to fix everything.
This may be seen as madness.
Absolutely. It is called religion. It creates an imaginary world to bring back a sense of balance and order in the chaos. Its yin is forever looking for its yang. If it is not on the inside, it goes out and looks for it on the outside.
The reducing-engine is a worthy tool, for life is filled with problems that require solving, as long as a desire for outcomes exists.
And as long as you seek to fix the problem yourself.
Taoism is about minimizing desires.
That’s what I’ve been saying all along. It is a plaster to cover the wound and not discover why the desires were the in the first place.
Reduce desire, and the mind has less work to do.
Externally trying to slow everything down, say, to focus on your breathing. Like a person with an anxiety attack needs to. Think yourself calm when that anxiety will only surface again and again in other times and circumstances.
It may then idle, and contemplate reality, leaving the soul to soar where it will.
A left brain in lock-down and the right brain will soar, just like in the video I referred you to in my last post.
Resulting in a state of clarity, balance, and content.
Nirvana. Part of everything. (Right brain).
The Western world has succumbed to its own mind, encouraged to become a God, and placed upon a pedestal. A golden-calf, carried on high, by each and every member. The graven image of ego.
Unperishable and distinct Object. (Left brain).
A yang that looking for its yin and so scriptures are created to externally teach them how to love and hate.
This ego can do nothing but destroy, while feeling smugly superior in its omnipotence. Incapable of error. Incapable of objectivity. Incapable of reason.
Ego is but the creation of the illusion of balance. When you prod it they go into upset mode.
All of this has parallels in The Bible. In every Holy Book. It is a phenomenon as old as the human race. The abuse of man’s greatest tool, to engineer his own downfall.
To try to fix his own problems.
Minimize ego. Minimize desire. Minimize thought. Increase life!
There you go again. The Mantra of the Right Brain. The left brain trying to kick in to provide consiousness and then the ego solution provided to minimize, minimize, minimize.
If you are interested, (as once a right-brained dominant fellow I was), to build up a puny left brain that was once feared as it took away the illusion and made one feel like dying, I will share the exercise technique that I used (and no longer need), to have both brains functioning equally.
I have had the opposite conversations with Muslims attached to their Allah Most Merciful and their fear of their puny right brains that are represented in the female. Their imbalance is seen in society too.
So, in simple terms, you claim that:
My happiness is the wrong kind of happiness.
My balance is the wrong kind of balance.
My peace is the wrong kind of peace.
My life is the wrong kind of life.
My worldview is the wrong kind of worldview.
My service is the wrong kind of service.
I am the wrong sort of human.
Thank you, Kinderling.
Why do you refer to yourself as The Perfect Child, anyway?
“So, in simple terms, you claim that:
My happiness is the wrong kind of happiness.”
If happiness is the avoidance of unhappiness, as the Buddhist avoids suffering and finds a whole new kingdom in the process, then yes.
“My balance is the wrong kind of balance.”
if it means affiliated to anything, ‘God in Heaven’ or ‘Earth within the Scheme of The Universe’, then yes.
“My peace is the wrong kind of peace.”
If it means avoiding conflict for a peace when there is no peace, then yes.
“My life is the wrong kind of life.”
If, like a homosexual, you create a parallel-universe where the mimicking becomes real where mutual masturbation is ‘sex’, and cohabitation is ‘marriage’, then yes.
“My worldview is the wrong kind of worldview.”
If there are masters and students, priests and laity, doms and subs, then yes.
“My service is the wrong kind of service.”
If service is to service someone, (taking care of it for them), and not push them back onto themselves, then yes.
“I am the wrong sort of human.”
If you are left-brain anesthetized by the right-brain’s “Universal Love”, or right-brain frozen by “the fear of God,” then yes.
I was returning home tonite from a home-grown-food African dinner party, (everybody wanted to come for this very special and rare taste of happiness), and pulled in at a gas station where a single woman, worse for wear after sleeping rough and addicted to drugs, asked me for some food. She explained the local homeless shelter was closed and the nearest was six miles away. I offered to buy her a hot meal and drive her to the shelter. She said she had been abused by a previous Good Samaritan and would rather not. I laughed and said victims are used by the Victim-Savers for themselves so I complimented her on being wise and we negotiated that I pay for her bus fare and we go into the gas station shop to buy a sandwich, lucosade and chocolate. At the checkout when giving her her produce she asked for another chocolate bar and I said she had had enough to get by on. Then she cursed me and stormed out.
I then paid for my shopping and went to the car. Looking up the road I saw her join up with a male staggering in the same worse-for-wear condition.
Her story was not true, I had been too concerned with my concern for a single woman on a cold night, to see thru it.
She lied this way because she knew males were more gullible.
I thought about driving up and asking for my money back, and the guy collapsing with one punch as he tried to have a go at me.
Nope, just a lesson to remind myself that I do not give out money. If she needed a lift she would have taken it because she could size up my character. I must stop apologizing for being male.
Does this story apply to you Crow? It seems to… because you played the victim when challenged, “I don’t deal in evidence or proofs”. when you are as tough as she is.
“Taoism invites non-interpretation of reality. This is something that requires practice. Once one is practiced at non-interpretation, the world becomes what it always actually was, but remained undetected, to the interpreting mind: exciting, rich, varied and perfect.”
This is great Right-Brain stuff, a table can be whatever you conceptualize it to be or not-to-be. In a healthy person as long as your left brain says “rubbish, that’s a table” everything is fine. If it doesn’t, every person can say they are not doing what they are doing.
A Jew may say Jehovah made males superior to females and men with deformed testicles cannot enter the inner temples. As long as your right brain says “rubbish, anyone with spirit should enter the temple for the words of a child are the most pure” If not, we live in a backward society living as our great, great, not-so-great forefathers did.
“My God doesn’t need anything at all.
It is, after all, God: It does not have needs.
It does not require me to spread It’s Holy Word.
Reverence for It, alone, suffices.”
And yet if you had a deep respect for God you would also want others to find what you had found. It would be your life’s work.
With my children I have only provided a protection around them, to teach them of the world’s half-brained ways and never taught them how to love or to be good.
“Normal people need laws, more than religion.
Laws that don’t change every five minutes.
Religious laws, without the religion.
Along the lines of the Ten Commandments.
Simple, clear, effective.
The world teaches them how to love and be good, and in that, they spot the fraud. No one writes the rules and drives their car but them.
“Why do you refer to yourself as The Perfect Child, anyway?”
I use the monika “Kinderling” to lite a fire. “Perfect Child” was originally going to be the WordPress website until I locked myself out when setting it up, and because WordPress said they did not have the technical support to open it for me, I just use it sometimes to add comments, something to do with how I log on or somethin’.
The perfect child is every child.
Frankly I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not I am living in accordance with the tao in anybody else’s eyes.
I am sure, also, that if the tao was able to care, it wouldn’t care either, what I did or how I did it.
I do what I do, live as I live, am as I am.
And apparently it works.
Why does it work?
Because I am no longer influenced by my mind.
I use it as I see fit, and do not allow it to use me.
And I see, only too well, and only too often, the mess a mind can make of people who are undisciplined.
Reply
Sun
04/19/2012 at 4:12 am
“Apparently.”
You’re probably right.
I’ve probably wasted my life going after enlightenment.
It’s so ’70s.
Like everything I’ve mastered in my long and difficult life, I’ve mastered those things just in time for them to become obsolete.
But I don’t mind. I’m still not dead.
You’ve put a great deal of energy into this – er – discussion.
Maybe it would serve you better to write a book about how everybody would be far better off being as miserable as you.
Tell them how. Tried and proven methods, etc.
Given the current state of affairs, it would probably be a best-seller.
Still, if it was, you’d have a whole new set of problems to deal with.
And you took mind altering drugs?
Indeed I did, in my youth.
It opened a trapdoor into eternity, that I had no choice but to enter into, and explore. Curiosity is in my nature.
The drug itself was only a light, in a darkened place.
It illuminated, then played no further part in my life’s unfolding.
As an afterthought, or whatever it is, that I do in place of thinking:
It has been assumed, by some, that I refer to ‘the universe’ as some ‘external’ thing. Whereas I have never stated this, and have, indeed, stated the opposite, as being ‘part-of the universe’.
In absolute terms, then, there is no outer, and there is no inner.
There is all-that-is, of which everything is a part.
Created in God’s image.
This inability to recognize the one-ness with what our eyes see, and our brains process, lies at the heart of human conflict, anxiety, and madness.
[...] Crow: “The discussion – for want of a better word – here, has shown some interesting [...]
Damn. The comments finally stopped.
And here I was, well on my way to the all-time record :)
[...] And you, (Crow), took mind altering drugs? Reply crow 04/23/2012 at 8:47 [...]