I Want To Better Myself

We have removed the barriers we have erected to clear perception. The equipment is inherent. You do not become different but feel more secure. We improve our view, as we become cognizant of the effects of our own thinking.. Every claim of insufficiency is just that. Reality can't be improved upon but we can better negotiate the terrain if we recognize it.

 

Expectation is the source of all woe, in the sense that you get what you expect. By the same token, expectation is the source of all satisfaction.

 

What does a realistic judgment look like?

 

Using the sixth sense of making sense of the senses, agreement is the source of satisfaction. I can expect something and be disappointed. I can only rest if I feel somewhat assured.

 

It doesn't necessarily look like anything. But I meant one that takes into account all sides of an issue.

 

You have what you expect.

 

Having and being are the same regardless what I expect. Expectation is expectation, an anticipatory condition on being. To anticipate is not the same as to ascertain. It could go either way or many ways.

 

Religion (monotheistic religions in particular) is by and large unintelligible to me without the mediation of philosophy.

I think your feeling is accurate and that likely is a reason why people generalize, however many people use the umbrella term 'religion' for monotheism in the same way people use the umbrella term 'sports' when they usually are referring to a few major sports in the culture. Generalization is useful for the sake of conveniece, efficiency and fluidity of discussion.

 

i was going to point that out but im trying to be less offensive lately!

i think thats cool, but remember you want to be a well rounded person who improves all aspects of their being, not just the spiritual side.

i think the best thing you can do with your life is help others, and in order to do that you need to be healthy, financially secure, etc.

 

I believe that everything is essentially mysterious. Experience itself is the most direct form of communication, and it does not speak in words. The personality is a mystery, its creation too complex to comprehend, as complex as the creation of the universe itself. Even if you die and go to Heaven, you'll still be confronted by the mysterious. You will experience and have nothing to say that can alter the experience. So I pretty much just try to forfeit control over everything. It's a really hard thing to do...you get confused and start wondering if nobody is going to love you and maybe you've turned into a horrible monster and everything about your personality is wrong. Maybe all there is is this life and I'm stupid for not competing with everyone over money, fame, and sex. But I don't cave into that sort of desperation. People will perpetually accuse you of being something they understand fully. Their way of life has to be the only way of life or maybe they're screwing the whole thing up. I just let 'em worry.

 

^You had me until the I just let them worry part....WHY?

 

I doubt we'll ever get away from generalizations on here. It's the nature of forums.

 

... And when we do, it's often spent arguing what a particular passage means for about half a page.

 

Faith is holding a conviction about a state of affairs without having evidence to support that conviction.

This is a recipe for disaster.

Sure, if you have faith that feeding the homeless is the most important task in life, then your faith is producing good actions no doubt. But that very same faith can convince you that hijacking and flying an airplane into a building is the most important task in life.

It makes one wonder, what is the actual merit of believing in things while not having evidence for them? It seems that in the vast majority of cases one can think of, in vast majority of real world examples, performing this behavior is actually detrimental to the well being of the planet.

You might say, "How is science any better, when people like the Nazis used science for great evil?" but you miss the important side of stories like that; the Nazis took it on faith that they were the superior race, chosen by god, and that other races were inferior and fit only for experimentation and destruction. It's not like they developed a large body of carefully reasoned experiential data which proved that in fact, the jews are inferior and should be put in ovens. They believed this without evidence (constructing evidence where their minds could do so) and proceeded henceforth with their more careful tasks.

I really do not see how faith is anything to be cherished or preserved, and it is sad that it is enshrined in popular culture as a virtuous facet of personality or action of being.

Faith is jumping to conclussions, plain and simple. If those conclussions are good, then we have merely been lucky this time, and the bullet has not come for us yet.

Perhaps tomorrow will not be such a bright day when the full potential of faith is revealed.

When it comes to epistemologies on offer, faith is really at the bottom of the barrel, the absolute worst choice a person can make to arrive at knowledge (it by definition cannot arrive at knowledge) and to live one's life. You might feel your faith "gives you strength", but then I ask, how strong is the strength that must be built on a castle in the sky? What strength is it that cannot stand the light of evidence? Of reason? Of investigation? What is this strength that must be hidden from the harsh light of inquiry?

It seems to me to be a kind of shill, a substitute for strength. All bark and no bite.

 

I love gardening. Wish I had the space to do it.

Maybe what I was thinking was not typed the way I wanted to convey it. I am open to theories/assumptions, but I am not very willing to place my life on them without validating them as facts. I am willing to place large amounts of time into doing so, as I did with Christianity (13 years).

Hinduism does not have a monopoly on chakras. I believe in chakras, because I have seen a lot of articles and videos that chakras and your endocrine system are the same, which would be medical science. But you may be right, because I have not sought out credible sources and that I am relying in my own personal experiences with chakras. I have been doing some study on Reiki and chakras and have applied some of the methodology and have noticed some surprising results. But again, that is my personal experience and it is nothing more than a testimony. Me telling you this is no different than a Christian telling you that they seen Jesus Christ in spirit and that he is real.

 

I think you're still in the fetal stages of inquiry, because you start off your points by saying how much you value evidence and reason, and how important those things were in freeing you from the ideological shackles of christianity, but then you almost forget what you just went through when you say that chakras and kundalini sound legit because there's youtube videos and stuff. This is sadly a common fate for many a free thinker, it seems we might all have our kryptonite, our one concept which we are simply enamored with and cannot "step outside of" to see the big picture.

Do you see how the way you are approaching Chakras right now is exactly the way in which you probably approached Eucharist? Or Calvary?

If Kundalini is equal to the human endocrine system, then we can look at which of the two concepts offers a better understanding of this one phenomenon. One is couched in mysticism, unfounded statements of cosmology and spirituality, while the other has almost uncountable pieces of physical evidence supporting it (I can hold the human endocrine system in my hands, literally), as well as an ungodly amount of studies and tests done to support its statements and predictions.

My mother takes medicine to support her endocrine system, without it she will have major medical problems. If someone came along and replaced her medicine with instruction pamphlets on chakra meditation, I would consider this an act of attempted murder, and I hope that you would too.

 

You're talking about religious faith here. There is also another kind of faith. A belief for instance in one's own ability to do something beyond one's previous achievements. That requires a kind of faith.

I have faith in my own judgement. I don't see how I could proceed if I didn't, as I can't always know how any particular choice I make will turn out with absolute certainty.

Religious faith is another thing, and it certainly can have negative consequences.

 

Hinduism and Hindu Tantric yoga is the origin of the idea of the chakras. It's not a question of a monopoly.

 

I don't want to get side tracked here into semantics but there is a pernicious misuse of this word "faith" in exactly the way you have described. You actually don't have faith in your abilities. What you have is a combination of hope that you can perform certain tasks, and knowledge based on evidence that you have performed similar tasks before (or have demonstrated an ability to learn new tasks, that the task in question is reasonably achievable, etc).

I'm very vexed by this double use of "faith" because in every debate about the merits of "religious faith", the religious will always turn around and say "don't you have faith in yourself? don't you have faith that your parents love you?" The answer is no, I don't. If I needed faith to know that my parents love me, I might require counseling. What I have is decades of evidence showing that they love me. What I have is decades of evidence showing me that I am a capable person, and if I'm not, that believing I am will have a placebo effect and positively impact outcomes.

I want to start a movement to slowly eject the common use of "faith" from the english language, and relegate it to its religious meaning, so that this kind of strawman argument is not possible to waste people's time with anymore.

The definition of "faith" used in this common way is "complete trust", which right away should ring alarm bells, if you've spent any time on this planet with your eyes open.

Anyone who has "complete trust" in anything is delusional, even if wilfully and benignly so. It might be romantic to say you have "complete trust" in your loved one, but it would be trivially easy to show that you actually don't.