Something I was told a while back:
All good thoughts come from the holy spirit,
and all bad thoughts come from the devil.
This seems like an absolute duality to me.
The mormon missionaries told me this.
It seems like an extreme, unhealthy idea.
Thought-insertion is a form of psychosis.
If this is true, however,
it changes how the world works and what is real.
Satan would need to be extremely well funded
to be able to test and screw with everyone on earth.
I think Satan is dead.
Died in civil war.
A shadow lord took his place.
Shadow lords are masters of illusion.
They make fake gods, and trick real gods/demigods.
I worry that my missionary friends have bore an error
that will lead to much untruth.
Wholeness eschews duality. See the NT book of James on divided minds and psyches.
BTW, I’m 78. and have learned of wholeness (holiness) from the Bible, from oriental religions, from indigenous people and from mystics. I have also had personal experiences of oneness with the Nature and the universe. Duality is missing the mark. Duality seeks to divide that which is whole (holy). Remember atonement is at- one-ment.
You’re 78y old?
Happy birthday.
Sorry that you must be old.
Maybe you don’t have too many old age problems yet.
I’m not sure.
It’s interesting you find out about wholeness from religious sources.
I’m still wondering if all is at peace.
Sometimes I feel that all is at peace,
but i worry it is just my own comfort,
and not a real thing in the world.
Please read “A Course in Miracles”. It notes that we are and were always whole and that belief that we are not whole and good is an illusion. There is a place within where peace can be found.
Suffering may be illusory,
but when you are at your worst,
a miracle seems like a really good thing,
but you don’t get the miracle.
Some people break, they die, praying.
t’s true. I’ve seen faith healing used as a cudgel to beat people up for their lack of faith. Yet, spontaneous healings are documented even in the journals of medicine. Isn’t all healing whether through medicine or the body’s own resources worthy of being considered divine?
If life is created by a divine force, then healing a life honors its maker, perhaps.
Help/support is the essence of many morals, too.
So healing qualifies as help/support.
Sure, there are a lot of religions, even christianities, that are monistic. However that does not prove that their opposites are wrong, that dualism is and has to be false. Wholeness seems to be a formal concept, in my opinion, because what we experience is never whole. We always experience a surface, a what-is-for-us and never what-is-for-the other. What I write inelegantly I am sure you recognize as various philosophies. We could add more. But they all hint to the point that Wholeness is not as easily derived from experience as is Duality.
The only error I see is the credit both of you give to the supernatural.
“Shadow lords”? Sounds like Marketing department. As for “bad thoughts”, without knowing what was specifically meant, I can imagine that these are human, all-too-human thoughts that all of us are quite capable of, even if not everyone gets to experience them. However, if there was such a thing as “satan”, because bad thoughts come to us naturally (and you can insert there the christian belief in original sin which negates the need for satinic action) inserting bad thoughts would not be expensive at all.
Again, ask marketing.
One of the biblical stories about satan provides an example. Satan does not insert thoughts into Job- Job’s thoughts in fact are not even “bad” (even in Yahweh’s judgment), but he has these thoughts which are to be shunned.
The duality your friends are forced into are the response theists have produced to the problem of evil. Bad thoughts coming from the devil are just a by-product of their overall stance.
We exist in an ecosystem in which all parts are interdependent constituents of the whole. When we realize that we are one thing, the divisions among us become illusionary. This fact is becoming apparent to scientists and evolutionary psychologists. It is not a mere belief of certain religions; it is a fact of existence in this particular biosphere. Wholeness is certainly not an abstract concept. It can be experienced. Dualism is evidence of a fall of man into mental contraries. The survival of human life on this planet demands a view of the Other , not as in conflict with the “I”, but as part of a whole, which Includes I and Thou.
Such is the way of the discursive intellect identified with Left brain cognition. The human spirit can intuit the oneness of all things, Being Itself, below the discrimination necessary for language. In the intermediate zone are images which are identified with the Right brain. Would-be philosophers seem to become intoxicated with the Left brain and lose sight of the Right, the domain of the artist and visionary. Yet, they are there, the living images, if we will only attend to them beneath the cacophony and hostility of the world.
I don’t think you are using the term duality correctly.
Duality is a concept applied to individual issues.
In duality, what comes from the holy spirit, should that fiction exist, you must seek the duality within the one statement.
“All good thoughts come from the holy spirit,”, from a dualistic view, would have both a good side and an evil side.
That would also apply to your, “and all bad thoughts come from the devil.”
For 1, good thoughts are good, but if you see someone doing evil, you will not have good thoughts, and there is nothing wrong with that. Love corrects.
For 2, bad thoughts are good if as above, they are properly directed.
Duality, like Yin and Yang, are not in opposition and are to compliment each other, like front having/needing a back.
At macro-level, yes, but at the level in which we operate each part seeks its own survival and endures limited resources. Life is, with few exceptions, life consuming life. That our body could sustain a bear (if we were so unfortunate) does not detract from the immediate expatriate of “me” and decidedly “not-me”.
At the level in which we are one with all, there is no “we” at all, so I doubt that we can become aware of it, cognizant of this Unity. How are scientists and evolutionary psychologists gaining such awareness?
If we consider the environment as that “Other”, I agree on the importance of seeing our dependence; but is there interdependence? There is no interdependence and so no unity. It is valuable to overcome our differences, see our place within the environment rather than as something above it or independent, but this requires the dualism itself. The problem is not the duality but the relationship of the parts.
Hello Omar",
“We must love one another or die.” Global warming underscores the fact that we are all in this together. The us vs them mentality only adds to the prospect of man’s possible self destruction. If we do not pay attention to what is at stake on the macro level, we forfeit all claims of caring about what occurs in the meso and micro levels of life on Earth.
Even Dawkins admits that altruism is an adaptational plus. The mental shift to we, as is noted by mystics, is the cure for suffering caused by the ravenous ego. My American native friends see the rocks, trees and animals as each and all part of a larger family. That is the spiritual outlook that could prevent man’s present race toward self-destruction.
I don’t deny the utility of training people to think of “we”, but I wouldn’t insist that this is a natural awareness that we have somehow lost. Or that the “we” concept can be grasped independently of a “them”. (In Star Trek, war is abolished on earth on the discovery that we are not alone in the universe- hence a new “them” allowed “us” to be extended into those who were formally “them”.) Altruism is adaptational but implying competition and division; that’s the evidence we get from nature, from animals uncorrupted, if you will, by the false mentality which you suggest has taken hold of man. Judging the issue by our closest cousins in the animal kingdom, Chimpanzees, illustrates how altruism is limited.
Cynics can say “A Chicken is an egg’s way to make another egg”, but it does illustrate that while at the macro-level we are all genetic material, organic forms, at the meso-level this is expressed in duality, in us/them. This is our default approach to living which endangers life on this planet as we know it, BUT, at the genetic level, where we are truly ONE, a “we”, Life doesn’t care. Life will go on. It matters to the individual, at the meso-level, that it doesn’t become extinct, but not because it’s aware of wholeness but because it is aware of itself.
Finally, if rocks and trees are part of a family then how is self-destruction even possible? Matter is neither created nor destroyed, so what exactly is destroyed? The Self. The selfish self perhaps. Is the practice of unselfishness, then, practicing death in life?
I believe that we face an existential threat in global warming but I doubt that we possess the natural ability to overcome our nature. One of your years should be astonished how we are dealing today with issues that go back centuries. If we haven’t overcome racism, for example, what expectations do we really have of overcoming climate change? Eradicating the duality of us/them can be tried through education but let’s not pretend that it was a duality that we fell into but a monism to which we must (and only can) aspire.
Hello Omar,
I would suggest that it is a vision of the whole in which each is an integral part that comes from the existential experience of belonging. I don’t see how belonging can be derived from us vs them. And I don’t see how ethics is possible without a view of the neighbor as equal to thyself. Yes, it saddens me that racism and other divisive ideas have persisted now into the 20th century. But these ideas have not produced one positive result for the improvement of the human race.
There are many existential experiences. As it was suggested by Sartre “Hell is other people”. The sense of belonging can be derived from us/them as I alluded above in the Star Trek scene.
I believe that the improvement of mankind is complicated. Even at our finest moments we see the undertow of our nature. The Founders agreed that it was “self evident that all men are created equal” even as their wealth was measured by the number of slaves they owned. The effort that we have put as a species to develop ethics speaks against any angelic nature. It speaks, if you would ask a christian, about our fallen nature.
There’s no final solution to our dilemma. Improvement is effort. It is not something we acquire and done, but only as good as we struggle. Albert Schweitzer was a remarkable man who had a similar desire as yours and who was nonetheless criticized by many perhaps because he didn’t see the Other enough (his paternalism), or perhaps it was his critics who focused too much on the Other. To me Schweitzer led an ethical life. What he did was not remarkable because he saw no us/them, but because of what he set out to do from precisely this duality. Duality is not a hinderance to doing good. It was the awareness of his privilege that led Gautama to explore enlightenment. And in both of these men’s lives the defining factor was their effort rather than their success at erasing dualism itself.
Hello Omar,
I still don’t see how ethics can be derived from us/them without considering the them as deserving of what the us deserves. The situation of enmity seldom, if ever, allows empathy and compassion. Schweitzer believed that the “kingdom is within” everyone, a God longing or hunger for righteousness. Sartre is much too bleak for my taste. I don’t see how, currently in the U.S., we can escape the present pandemics of Covid and racism with us vs them attitudes. They seem to thrive on us vs them.
Schweitzer believed that the “kingdom is within” everyone, a God longing or hunger for righteousness.
It is, but as Jesus said, many are called but few hear it.
The righteousness to the god religions has been replaced with the longing for a genocidal god like Yahweh.
Righteousness of god is a Gnostic Christian demand for God. Not a Christian one. A genocidal Yahweh canned be named righteous.
As to where our feelings and desire/hunger in finding god. Our instincts and DNA tell us we are the best of our genetic line, till we have a younger sibling, and pushes us to be in the best team, if not lead it able to lead it.
Our desires and need for fellowship rule and is exercised through our tribalism.