Recognition that there is a problem is a prerequisite for making changes.
If you’re in denial, then that’s it … you’re stuck in that spot at least for the time being.
Well, you’re still going to make mistakes no matter how wise or enlightened you are.
If you are wise or aware and trust your feelings, then you might catch your mistake sooner and correct it faster.
I’m really not saying that my concern prevents all errors. Really.
Yes, that’s more or less my point: a part of wisdom is knowing that parts of systems often need other parts to be effective or not damaging. If knowing this your intuition, for example, still leads to you try just one piece, well you probably have a better change or realizing something is missing or wrong later on.
Again, given that my own interest in religion [God or No God] revolves around how those on a spiritual path intertwine their religious beliefs in their behaviors in their assumptions about “I” – the “soul” – on the other side of the grave, you will either bring the words “faulty” and “correct” thinking down to earth here or you won’t.
Given a particular context in which, depending on their religious and moral beliefs, different people choose different [and often conflicting] behaviors, how do we account for this? And how do those on their different spiritual paths come together in order to choose the optimal behaviors?
And how do they go about demonstrating that their own beliefs regarding morality here and now and immortality there and then reflect that which all other spiritual people are obligated to embrace in turn with so much at stake?
Here I suspect we may as well go back to the reasons our exchange on this thread – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=186929 – ended.
But, again, all I can do is to ask you to bring the existential parameters of your own spiritual path “out into the world” and describe a set of circumstances in which you have thought yourself into believing that your own thinking is not faulty, but is correct. That way, in turn, you could note more substantively how and why my own thinking [encompassed in my signature threads] is in fact faulty and not correct.
Also, we could examine your accusation that I somehow manage to turn all of the arguments from others into “intellectual contraptions” more…existentially?
Instead, you go straight back up into the clouds of “spiritual” abstraction:
You have proof. Proof for anyone. But they would have to “submit [to you] for some months and follow [your] instructions without any questions and [they] will get the proof.”
I’m sorry but that sounds more like something out of Scientology or Nxivm or one of the dozens of new age/guru mentalities with their prepackaged spiritual agendas.
Only yours is the one true path, right?
Just out of curiosity, have you in fact taken others down this path? Did they see the light? Do you charge money for this? No, seriously.
Okay, if that’s the argument you wish to use for explaining the behaviors that you choose in a world teeming with conflicting goods that ends in the death of each of us one by one, it virtually guarantees that no one here will be able to take you up on it.
But can’t you at least give us some idea of how “correct thinking” persuades you to choose the behaviors that you do in your interactions with others when value judgments comes into conflict? And what you imagine the fate of your own “soul” to be on the other side?
Sorry lamb,
I am no more interested in your - from my own frame of mind and note to others kind of philosophy. Please find someone else.
So, Sayonara. Take care.
With love,
Sanjay
No problem. I can imagine what is at stake for you if you ever start to doubt your own years-in-the-making “spiritual contraption”. All I have to do is think back on what happened to me when I began to doubt my own.
But what I wouldn’t given to actually have the option to take you up on your claim to be able prove that what you do believe “in your head” really is the one true spiritual path to…what exactly?
Besides, there are plenty of folks here at ILP who are more than willing to explore religion with you – East or West – up in the stratosphere of more purely spiritual pursuits.
Zinnat
Is it “the one true spiritual path”?
One can probably get to the same place with Christian contemplation/meditation. And other practices.
Or maybe different paths lead to different places.
What are the different places?
There is no such one true spiritual path. All paths are valid so whatever works for one. However the ultimate goal is the only one for each and every path. Intermediate stations during that journey may differ to some extent. Having said that, some religions/ paths stop before the ultimate goal.
With love,
Sanjay
Well, if you medidate in a mindfulness tradition and focus on observing your thoughts and emotions, just observing them, it seems to me you will reach, after many years, a different place than someone in a Bhakti Hindu ecstatic tradition or someone who spends their time focusing on love of Jesus and trying to see Jesus in everyone they meet or than a shaman who focuses on going through the underworld and seeking visions of a deity or many. For examples. There are other traditions also. IOW you are training to do quite different things, and in neurological terms, you are engaging different parts of the brain and involving the neuronal clumps in the heart and gut regions quite differently also. I meant place metaphorically.
Yes, something like that though not exactly. Details are different but your thought direction is right.
With love,
Sanjay
That’s exactly the reaction I had to your posts.
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That’s exactly the reaction I had to your posts.
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Okay.
With love,
Sanjay
I tend to think that people who share essentially the same biology and live in the same universe would reach the same understanding and insights.
I notice that people who share the same biology and live in the same universe reach different understandings and insights. And then also states of mind, which is where I was focused. And also modes of life.
Some of those understandings and insights are mistaken.
These practices are supposed to lead to a clearer, truer understanding. Therefore, I think that they ought to converge. If not to one point then to multiple uniquely identifiable points.
That’s what I’m focusing on because states of mind and modes of life could be called subjective.
Is there some objective enlightenment?
I’m not arguing there is. I think if your main practice is filled with passion and is decidedly interpersonal, this will lead to you have different experiences and expertise, states of mind, than someone who has a detached, not interpersonal, emotionally calm practice. In a sense like any two people learning two quite different skills will, when they perform their art or job, will perform differently. Perhaps some understandings will be the same, perhaps not. But it seems likely to me that if one set of practices is intentionally engaging the amygdala as central to the practice and the other is detaching from it, what one experiences down the line, and what one is like down the line will have significant differences.
And then, also, different understandings of the role of emotions and what one is striving for.
This also fits my experience of the people who have been practicing these traditions for a long time. They have rather different presences, especially if we include pagan/indigenous/shamanistic practitioners creating a third distinct mode, different ways of relating (as tendencies in the groups) and different insights.
It’s not a coincidence that Buddhism tends to no self in ways that other practices do not. That some traditions have a no self rebirth and others a full on reincarnation. Or that the Christians have no reincarnation and a heavy moral focus. Or that the submissive self effacing practices (which include a kind of fatalism) in Islam leads to the way Muslims live and behave and relate to death.
Different practices, different parts of the brain, different foci.
I feel like it’s a cliche that they all lead to the same place, same beliefs.
Then Biggus’ “all in the head” might be a valid point.
The understandings and insights could be entirely imagined into existence. Each particular practice leading to a particular kind of “dream state”. Different dream states because of the focus and emphasis of the practice but still only dream states.
Sure it could be.
But let’s separate out a few things.
We have
You might have very different modes of life with similar assertions about the nature of reality. You might have different modes of life and different assertions about the nature or reality. Some assertions might be objectively correct. Some modes of living might feel better than others for everyone, for some, or might fit personal desires or goals or preferences.
There are a lot of possibilities here.
Reality might have various aspects also, and each path ends up giving one insights into a different, perhaps overlapping, set of qualities and truths.
Perhaps reality is much more flexible than some realize and there is more than one objective truth, even contradictory ones.
My main focus in this last part of the discussion is on the idea that different practices will lead to different ways of experiencing and perhaps different conclusions about the nature of reality. How compatible these are I think is up in the air.
And this includes what someone like Iamb concludes, even about what is possible, what is epistemologically sound and so on. His metaposition is just as subject to all this. Which he admits. We all have practices. And practices lead to experiences and beliefs (along with inborn traits and temperment).
When you choose a set of habits, they will set you up for what and how you experience, and also what you believe. Or if you are a determinist, you might say the habits and your genes cause your experiences and beliefs.
My sense is people in different religions with different religious practices (and of course different religious texts and foci and assertions) end up with quite different worldviews and ways of experiencing. A Western Buddhist may have much more in common with an utterly secular non-Buddhist non-meditator than they do with a Muslim cleric who spends as much time in prayer as the Buddhist spends meditating. Much more in common when it comes to morals, beliefs, temperment, ways of experiencing the world, prioritization of emotions/reasoning and so on. A shaman is going to experience dreams, waking, nature, animals, the past, selves radically differently (at least a good deal of the time) than a Hindu or an atheist in Detroit or a Christian. A psychoanalyst will experience a conversation quite differently from an Orthodox jew (unless he is one). The way they each would view ‘what is going on’ in the conversation will likely be radically different.
The point, for me, is to strip away these differences in experience and to have ‘raw’ experience … without the filters that being a Jew or Hindu or Christian introduces.
I see that as the objective experience of being human. And it’s that experience which produces understanding and insight.