Friday, January 30, 2009

For those of you who practice yoga,a martial art, or meditate, here is a comment from the wise Walt in the comment section over at One Cosmos yesterday:

"It has seemed to me that there is experience, and there is a "knowing" that there is experience, i.e. a part of the brain registers, and a part of the brain can stand apart from that registration. That seems to be a fact, and has intrigued me.

In my own case, there has seemed to be "something not quite right" in how it all works, which has motivated me to investigate. From the start, I knew I didn't know much, and I also noticed early-on that people a lot more informed than myself recognized a God -- and, of course, many others like yourself did not. So for me, it became "a question."

We can skip the details of the search -- let's just say "all the usual places, and some not-so-usual" and let it suffice.

My approach has been to pursue various questions about the nature of Reality, and then try to test them in very practical terms, using myself -- body, mind, and feelings -- as the laboratory.

Along and along, I "encountered" certain experiences and sources of input that seemed to me to be "more Real" than many others, and which gave "refreshing results." At some point, those results became like an "aesthetic sense" which seemed to act like a guidance system when I paid attention to it. I began to judge things by their results.

As this process developed, I came to notice that "attention" itself was a central ingredient, and especially the "quality" of attention."

Now, all of the foregoing went on over the years without even once the word "God" being uttered. I sensed that something was happening, but did not know what it was. One Cosmos has given me "words" to match my understanding of Reality. It took me awhile -- and some study -- to catch the outlines of the cosmology, but I found that it was not only coherent but also congruent on its own, and that it complemented other cosmologies that I was familiar with. In fact, I saw that it illumined them.

See the words I put in italics up there? Those are hard words for me to ignore, because of the experiences they contain.

My point to you is that I am here, and I've been around here for awhile, and I can work with this information without ever saying "I believe in God." And I never would have stuck around here in the first place had I had to invest "belief" in anything, or persuade myself of anything.

Maybe that's too small a point to worry about -- the use of certain words, I mean -- but to casually say, "I know you guys believe in God," doesn't fit everyone. Truth, it seems to me, is sufficient reason to be here, and trumps "belief", for me.

Now faith -- that is another matter altogether ...."

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