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…[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eCZc45xFyg[/youtube]
…[size=150]America. My America. The real America. America now.
To see and feel the emotions of my country now, experience this video. [/size]
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Most of humanity’s problems stem from misapplication of will, mind, resources, etc. Unwisdom wreaks endless havok.
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[b][size=124]Most of humanity’s problems stem from application of will, mind, resources, etc. Wisdom wreaks endless havoc.
FTFY[/size][/b]
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Are you serious? You think we’d be better off as chimps?
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[size=124]Our ego is at once our blessing and our bane.
Our individual ego estranges us from our immediate reality.
And yet, with our highly developed intellectual function we are able to study the reality that we find ourselves a part of.
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Having an identity and beliefs about yourself doesn’t always estrange us to our reality.
Accurate self judgement helps us know which parts of reality we are best suited for.
I don’t believe in the “ego is bad” ideas. There is bad ego, but that doesn’t mean all ego is bad.
I tried very hard to reach God. Then I discovered there’s no need to reach ; that reaching actually takes you away from God.
I agree with V. God wants you to love Him, and He’s not playing hard to get.
But Dan, there’s “ego” and then there’s identity. What’s meant by ego is the part of the spine/brain that feels it has to limit its perceptions in order to protect the identity. It’s the limiter on the identity’s power to intertwine with the world, become a “true self”, a force that is stable and powerful, fearless and overflowing with good will, compassion.
Often, it is society, the examples we’re being given, that forces this ego on us. By the very structure of our society, we’re instructed to think that man is a worthless bag of slime, not powerful enough to wipe his own ass, doomed to make the world a bit dirtier every day. It’s often virtually impossible to relate the higher self to the image of the world our human culture is projecting on us. And yet, each individual can easily drop his ego in the right social setting.
“The Kingdom of God” would mean, to me, a place where everyone knows the right people. No increase in virtue or worth would be necessary, only the opportunity to exercise that virtue which means the increase of his relative worth. In other words, the responsibility is with the collective, at the level of sociology and technology. The God-form we’d need to reach out to, work for, is a type of world, likely one heavily facilitated by communications technology, but ultimately enabled by man admitting to his self-worth and the following will to take on responsibility.
So in a sense, we’re trying too hard, in another sense, we’re not nearly trying hard enough.
What possible use is the concept of God if He is only to cater to our sense of well being? Man is perfectly capable of doing that himself, as is every organism.
The God that demands ultimate effort is the same God that represented the change from one celled being to complex organism. It’s a being that is not yet there but still calling out from the future, a being which is implicit in the potential of what is here.
I know Nietzsche does’t seem like the best context to look at God qua God, but he makes some good points. On the Ego:
" Jesus opposed the commonplace life with a real life, a life in truth: nothing was further from him than the stupid nonsense of an “eternalized Peter,” an eternal personal survival. What he fights against is this exaggerated inflation of the “person”: how can he desire to eternize precisely that? " [WTP 166]
What survives instead is the “acts” and “love” - i.e. the consequence of ones virtue. Ones “power”, as directly opposed to ones personality.
All awakenings to power mean a shedding of personality, of history, of ego.
Why do you say this?
Some say that there are many paths to this god.
What’s your path?
We can only reach out to god to the extent that we can reach out to each other.
So, for what purpose are we reaching out to each other? Simply to find God?
No. Without the vertical reach (us to God) the horizontal reach (us to each other) is simply not possible in any spiritual sense.
Hmmm…I’m an agnostic but if I were an atheist, and had no desire to reach out to god, does this mean that I would be worthless to my fellowman? Does this mean that god could not touch them through me or i could not be touched by god through them, even not believing? Is there no “spiritual” sense without a god Ierrellus?
No. If you were an atheist and truly cared for your fellow creatures, you would be doing God’s business. Names obscure the reality of what can or should be done. In that sense, the reaching out is all that matters; and, yes, the reaching out is spiritual, regardless of how you label it.
The path of no path … obviously.
Then I’m in trouble. I live alone. Unless reaching out on the phone counts … then I’m okay. Is god on the other end of the line?
Usually so. I face extreme lonliness and talk to cats and gnats and flies as if they could understand the onlyness of being in a place wherein we seldom hear a welcome. And so I post. Hey, God, if you are on the internet, I need an answer to the question of why live. The answer sometimes comes over the phone.
Can you please describe that for me, just in case I come upon it. 
Or send an image…sometimes an image can be worth a thousand words.