[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

It all sounds great Sky and you have every right to believe in that stuff if it floats your boat but it's also besides the point.

Please don't get the idea that I think your guy is some kind of brigand. I don't. I just think that he had no right to destroy other peoples property like that. It's just another form of "ends justify the means" argument and while you can dress it up in the most noble of intentions it's wrong none the less.

Property...? This is all what it is about for you...??? Simple materialistic possession claims...? Wowh.

That is as absurd as the church selling the divine forgiving of sins for money (if you were poor, than you have a problem), or a priest saying that believers cannot enter God's paradise in the afterlife if entrance violates earthly laws and treaties and the curch's statutes on who can enter when and how and what dress to wear on that occasion.

You value the message as lower than the paper it has been fixed on. A Krämerseele you are! ( a bean-counting salesman that is). Very German it sounds, too - not in a complimentary way, though.

But very religious it sounds as well. The surface counts more than the fundament. Obey. Don't seek rescue by your own. respect the authority of the - well, the authorities.

August, I tried to make it clear earlier. In the face of the transitoriness of all things being, and your life as well, nothing is important than to learn who you are and to learn how to avoid booking (due to lacking insight) another round on the wheel of life, because that turning fo the wheel means entering the realm of transitoriness again, and thus: means endless suffering. That is the basic logic behind Buddhism. Various sectarian major traditions later introduced variations of this, some focussing on a more social, altruistic view, others more on a more self-centered view, but that is not important here now.

And since you opened by indicating I "believe" something in there. I have a very sober view on these things, even cold-blooded, I sometimes got told. I do not know whether the wheel-of-life thing and reincarnation is to be taken literally or not - for evaluating that I lack own experience and background knowledge on the fundamentals running the universe. Karma to me only means: every cause has a reaction, and the link may be so complex and going over multiple levels and instances that it is hard to see maybe - and still: every cause has reaction. On enlightenment, I do not sign for for example Tibetan ideas on entering the land of Buddha in the four directions of the sky, nor do I think that a hundred thousand kneeling-downs on your way to the next shrine does you any good in your karmic balance sheet. What drives me is the uncertainty over the question of why things are, why I am and what this life is all about. Why is not simply nothing? What is my mind that thinks, and what are the things that I normally pressume to be like I see and hear them, while I know that their appearance is only an image, a construct in my brain - what is their real nature, then? How can I find out when I have no chznace to ever expereince their real essence direclty by my senses and my intellect? How to leave both behind and gain the immediate expereiunce? Can this even be had as long as I separate myself from them by thinking of them as "them" and think of myself as "me"?

And I think it is helpful to gain an attitude of mind, a mental discipline if you want, that does not immediately judge and thus rule in favour and against perceptions and ideas the very moment our senses have sent another sequence of chemical-electrical stimuli into our brains. I think to start by staying inactive and observe, may be helpful to see how things are moving, and gaining insight into their inside, their real nature, the patterns they form. It may also show helpful for myself - in order to stay calm, to become less and lesser a playing ball of my rampaging emotions and fears and other mental projections that I superimpose onto the world. The fear of never getting answers, not knowing what is after this life, still is there. But this way, it sometimes has become bearable, and cannot command me around anymore. Enlightenment seen this way is an attitude of mind, a state of mind. And although you alwaqys have it in full, it never stops to emrbace more and unfolds, like about evolution can be said that in any moment there is total perfection in every species existing, for it has reached as best a design as that design could have unfolded and developed in the time that has so far been available.

Believing has as much to do with it as it is a question of believing when you make a choice on whether you prefer the taste of lemon tea or peppermint. You check both, and then you know what you like. It is an empirically founded decision. Religions make even this complicated again, bringing in divine wills and heavenly laws when to drink what and why something else is claimed to be forbidden. That is believing, August. Basing on the common German translations of these terms, "belief" meansto take something that cannot be checked and analysed, as factual and proven truth nevertheless, a claim on a deity existing for example. "Faith" is somethign else. It is an empirically justified trust that comes from own and direct experience and is strengthened further by the results of such checks and analysis.

"Dear God, give us trust, but save us from believing" - this was written in these or very similiar words by Aldous Huxley, in "Island".

No easy answers there. Just images of reflections inside reflections, endlessly. He who wants easy answers and rules to follow, indeed just should pick up and read a manual and at the end make a test with multiple-choice items always offering just one answers. But that is a human life wasted, I say, a waste of human ressources and potentials (that waste is what makes me so hostile and angry towards religions). It's energy could as well have been spend to form a pigeon learning to pick a key to get a corn rewarded.