Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Poetic insight & philosophy by Cecil Lee.

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Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by mtmynd » October 9th, 2005, 2:17 am

Preface: I originally wrote this Stream on 9/21/03 and within this same silence I returned after yesterday's quake in Pakistan,India/Afghanistan where mankind's buildings fell from Earth's seizure.

This new millenium that we are passing through has brought on many social changes, too numerous to name, but as we, mankind, wreak havoc upon ourselves through our own changes, Silence reminds me that Nature, too, must change.

Life is eternal but not a constant. Life giveth and Life taketh as it's always done and will always do. We take the lives of our own, we take the lives of the fauna and flora... presuming since we can we must. Nature reminds us that "She" also takes lives in sometimes all too dramatic ways as witnessed through "Her" recent violent acts, which we in all our pride and boasting pale in comparison.

It is a sad situation that we don't lose enough of our own by the hand of Nature, but we continue taking the lives of so many innocents and to gain what? Monuments to our heroics that one day will crumble to Nature's fury. "From dust to dust and ashes to ashes" rings all too true.



Silent Words

Silence - the great Void that contains all of all, and we so small, so little we know of what we have been given thru this miracle called Life... we fight and gnaw, we scream and crawl after dreams that supersede our wake thru the oceanic turmoil, so well oiled, that we pass the chance to dance embraced with the Spirit that pervades our Inner ever quaking moment, to moment, we collapse fulfilled, spilled upon the woven togetherness of that which we are apart, a part of it all... we recall within the Silence that which makes us what we become, and none is our return into the Void, the sight of Silence, where even Om is swallowed complete, a neat trick upon our psychic... once released we dare complete the product of our Being, seeing that Silence, precious and protective, the shield of our Ego melting in the sweltering Light, our fight ends in the Silence... our home again to begin again, the spin to rise, to become the eyes that penetrate the loud and proud cloud of our seventh daze, we gaze , and wonder if this is real or is it Truth?

Words, like nets, pass thru the Silence that contains the essence of every thing, and we catch glimpses, parts and particles of the Oceanic that Life is encompassed by. We try and say that which Silence always says best. But our desire, our need, our want to communicate with those that we love, we like, we enjoy necessitates our words to touch the sacred... to touch with sound those that return, that reflect our Self, into the cosmic symphony. We parlay our chances to win the prize, to achieve our wholeness, our holiness, to become what we know lies within. And thru the net's openness, Silence returns to Silence. Our words spoken, our words written, now those may last our lifetime. But is our life a fragmented moment, or a series of moments building our words that pretend to understand the final product?

We build ourselves, and share ourselves thru words both spoken and written. But we realize not the power that words have over others we abuse, misuse. Our nets to capture from Silence cannot fully contain the Silence, but thru the words, between such words must be heard - the Silence.

The Silence holds the mysteries. The Silence speaks in Truth... but our words like ourselves have not matured to our potential. And so we progress, we undress, we caress, to recall the all of Silence. The aftermath of orgasms, the aftermath of union, the aftermath of, indeed, war... returns us to the Silence. The finished task, the end of day, the final word... returns us to the Silence.

And from the Holy Silence, we become more wholly, that which completes us... that which comforts us, stills us from our stress, our dis-ease... we please the Spirit, the ungraspable, the unknowable, with our nets, to confirm we are. For the Silence knows but we may not until the words are spoken.


Cecil
09 October 2005


Millipede as the nautilus - outliving mankind

Image

[Photo taken in the desert of Phar Lepht 8/16/05]

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Post by stilltrucking » October 9th, 2005, 4:24 am

It is only in nature that I can find silence
We build ourselves, and share ourselves thru words both spoken and written. But we realize not the power that words have over others we abuse, misuse. Our nets to capture from Silence cannot fully contain the Silence, but thru the words, between such words must be heard - the Silence
.
I am the resident maniac here. I think of the obsidian words that I have spoken here and on litkicks. I run across them in the archives now and then. They make we wince. My verbal bricks come home to roost. A process of discovery for me Cecil, when I write I speak. I used to think I was whispering these words to myself as I write them. But it is not quite that. It is a silent voice that speaks within me as these words appear on this screen.
But I read your words in silence.
A mystery,

I been calling myself an atheist lately. Because no matter how I try to concieve God, it is ludirous,

So well said, I resist the urge to say Thank You, but I know you will not take it personaly. So I say thanks Cecil. This stream is most helpful.

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Post by Zlatko Waterman » October 9th, 2005, 9:54 am

Dear Still:


I have not read "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, winner of the 2005 P.E.N. nonfiction award, but I have read a review and some commentary. I plan to read it soon. There are excerpts on Sam Harris's web site:

http://www.samharris.org/


( the first ten pages of Harris's book):


http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samh ... apter-one/


(opening of "The End of Faith")

(PASTE)

1


Reason in Exile

The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city.

The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles.With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.

The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man’s parents by giving them gifts of food and money.

These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy—to guess the young man’s religion?


A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions:

1. You have only two weeks to live.
2. You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars.
3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.

These are mere words—until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior. There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like “God” and “paradise” and “sin” in the present that will determine our future.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.

But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs—antithetical to our survival.We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia— because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they will unmake our world.

A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggests that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence. What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge.3 We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to miss the point.


Of course, people of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith (e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures—forces like greed, hatred, and fear—for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.

Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.

And yet, intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Jay Gould have declared the war between reason and faith to be long over. On this view, there is no need to have all of our beliefs about the universe cohere. A person can be a God-fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning, without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept. He can, as it were, have his reason and eat it too. As the early chapters of this book will illustrate, it is only because the church has been politically hobbled in the West that anyone can afford to think this way. In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould’s notion of a “loving concordat” between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.

This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed—however obliquely and at a terrible price— by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions— Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God—for us to do this.

The Myth of “Moderation” in Religion

The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of crosspollination among them. Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.

According to Gallup, 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe. Another 48 percent believe that it is the “inspired” word of the same—still inerrant, though certain of its passages must be interpreted symbolically before their truth can be brought to light. Only 17 percent of us remain to doubt that a personal God, in his infinite wisdom, is likely to have authored this text—or, for that matter, to have created the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles. Some 46 percent of Americans take a literalist view of creation (40 percent believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years). This means that 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we, as a species, have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?

It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that we must decide what it means to be a religious “moderate” in the twenty-first century. Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate’s retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God’s utterances difficult to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. One look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has something very specific in mind should your son or daughter return from yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna:

If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. . . .(Deuteronomy 13:7–11)
While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a “symbolic” reading of passages of this sort. (In fact, one seems to be explicitly blocked by God himself in Deuteronomy 13:1— “Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away.”) The above passage is as canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for “moderation” in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law.

The only reason anyone is “moderate” in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc.). The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason in this regard; it is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago—and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession. Having learned about the known distances between objects in our universe, most of us (about half of us, actually) find the idea that the whole works was created six thousand years ago (with light from distant stars already in transit toward the earth) impossible to take seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions are in principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of ignoring (or “reinterpreting”) certain articles of faith is now overwhelming. Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.

So it is not that these texts have maintained their integrity over time (they haven’t); it is just that they have been effectively edited by our neglect of certain of their passages. Most of what remains—the “good parts”—has been spared the same winnowing because we do not yet have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intuitions and our capacity for spiritual experience. If we better understood the workings of the human brain, we would undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness, our modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego an illusion, and, if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.

While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.

The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or that trepanning* constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago—while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate—or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us—culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive
it.

Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.


*Trepanning (or trephining) is the practice of boring holes in the human skull. Archaeological evidence suggests that it is one of the oldest surgical procedures. It was presumably performed on epileptics and the mentally ill as an attempt at exorcism. While there are still many reasons to open a person’s skull nowadays, the hope that an evil spirit will use the hole as a point of egress is not among them.


( end paste)






Scientific rationalism, of course, is not an unguent for my romantic longings.

But I try to listen to as many wise voices as I can.

You might find Harris's book interesting.

Just a thought.


--Z

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Post by mtmynd » October 9th, 2005, 1:12 pm

truck - atheism is but another belief, as you may well know, but nevertheless, one must believe that there is no god in order to become what we call an atheist. On many levels I can certainly understand why someone would become an atheist - primarily there is no common understanding of what god is... when you say you don't believe in (a) god, what is it that you do not 'see' that would leave you to think that?

It is peculiar that mankind has always had a belief in something greater than themselves... something that in turn has been labeled 'god' or any of its equivalents. But ask those that do believe in (a) god what it is exactly that they believe - a man with a long white beard that rules the heavens upon a golden throne? Or is it a male power that runs through humanity and speaks to him/her of the life they should be living? Is god even gender specific? So many questions regarding a very large majority of humans that believe in god, but no mutual understanding as to how their god is defined. Ask five believers in (a) god what that means to them and you will have five different opinions as to how they define the word 'god'. How rational and logical is that?

As man evolves so does the concept of what (a) god is to them/us. And to complicate matters, there will always be those that have their concept of "god' that is engrained within that goes back hundreds and even thousands of years, depending upon their culture. Despite all these variable of what (a" god is, the fact is that everyone 'believes' in either the existence or non-existence of god... but few can say they have never heard the word, "god" (or the language equivalent).

My oldest son tells me he is an atheist... but sometimes is agnostic. It fluctuates. But we all fluctuate... it's change... it's human... it's life. To attempt to visual what this word 'god' is in order to prove the existence of 'it', is what makes the understanding (or communication with others), of 'god' ludicrous.

You first line, "It is only in nature that I can find silence," is very profound for nature is the physical manifestation of 'god'... an immense and changing variety with one commonality - it is live. God is a Live. God is not matter. God is not a gender. God is no thing. God is not a Supreme Being, but rather a Supreme State of Being achievable only in silence. Shattering this silence fractures God into multiplicities of things that we scramble to piece together in order to understand, but will always fail to complete if we continue to 'believe' that an unfinished puzzle is Truth.

Sorry, truck, for the ramble, but it's all your fault! :lol: :lol: :lol:

I enjoyed Z's link and paste very much. I hope you got something out of that. I certainly did. Thx, Z! Great piece of contemplation.

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Post by Artguy » October 10th, 2005, 10:09 am

Great stream Cec...almost replied with silence...perhaps a slight digression, but lately i have noticed with focused attention silence used in music as an integral part of music....the gaps of silence as musical Bardo....

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Post by mtmynd » October 10th, 2005, 11:18 am

Howdy, Kurt - "almost replied with silence," makes me smile... actually makes me laugh given the lack of responses! :lol:

Silence used in music... it is rather important, eh? otherwise all the notes would be one note is it weren't for the little spaces of silence between them... much like our writings. it's been said that all truth lies between the words, so would it follow that the message of the music lies between the notes..? a good contemplation.

Thx for stopping in! Always good to see you...

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Post by Arcadia » October 11th, 2005, 1:32 pm

thanks for the stream, Cecil!
saludos,

Arcadia

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Post by gypsyjoker » November 4th, 2005, 12:58 pm

the great Void that contains all of all, and we so small
Flux/Void
a void in flux
no common understanding of what god is...
same as true for the void
judih put her finger on it back on this weeks stream #?. or it seemed to relate. talking about the One"

I thought I caught a glimpse of the void the other day. Not what I expected. I expected that nothing would be happening there, but I still can not hear music, only the silent wind in the limbs of a live oak tree.
Free Rice
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'Blessed is he who was not born, Or he, who having been born, has died. But as for us who live, woe unto us, Because we see the afflictions of Zion, And what has befallen Jerusalem." Pseudepigrapha

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stilltrucking
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Re: Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by stilltrucking » October 20th, 2012, 6:38 am

I don't guess I will live long enough to chit chat again with you Norman. I miss you. Thanks for the link. I do a lot of thinking about death these days, I have outlived Kerouac by twenty five years and I got nothing to show for it except these random text boxes. Kerouac so old when he died, and I am younger than that now. I may convert to Catholicism any day now :)

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Re: Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by mtmynd » December 1st, 2012, 11:53 am

Hi, Jack! Here's to your health and longevity. Life is what we are given and what we accomplish with our gift. It's an ongoing process no matter how many years pass by reducing our life spans into incremental "thank you's" to whoever is listening... including ourselves.
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Re: Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by stilltrucking » December 1st, 2012, 1:00 pm

Howdy Cecil,
longevity is a blessing
fleeting samadhi

I am never there when I am
I only know I was there as the after thought
"that was it" kind of feeling.

Here is to your health and longevity
I thank the day I stumbled onto my litkick cyber pals

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Re: Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by mtmynd » December 4th, 2012, 2:07 am

I once thought
then paused
thinking thought
was overrated
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stilltrucking
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Re: Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by stilltrucking » December 4th, 2012, 10:54 pm

I once thought
then paused
thinking thought
was overrated
Tuesday night stream
I thought I was thinking
then I realized girls just wanna have fun

making a fool of my self again on the haiku board.


litkicks was it really as wonderful as I remember it.
This is a good thread cecil still rereading now I have made it about half way through Norman's long paste.

couple of thoughts

I don't think war was such a religious thing for Rome, they fought for power, for empire. I don't think they were trying to spread their religion. Same for the Persians too I think. I don't think religious wars came into fashion until monotheism came into fashion.
We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia— because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they will unmake our world.
A pity I kind of liked Apollo and Dionysus
Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society.
Also too bad, I am thinking of marksman45 or foolish pater. He seemed like the kind of guy I would like to see in a position of responsibility.


I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
that is a tough nut to crack.

"Is there no way out of the mind"
Norman thinks I am obsessed with Sylvia Plath, maybe so.
Be back later to finish up
Hope you don't mind.
inFriendship jt

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Re: Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by mtmynd » June 26th, 2021, 10:07 am

truck... rereading a passage - "There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal,” or they will unmake our world."

Who wrote this..? A very thoughtful line in particular.
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Re: Sunday Stream (50) ~ Silent Words

Post by stilltrucking » June 27th, 2021, 1:14 am

Sorry, I should have posted attribution.
The End of Faith
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
https://www.google.com/search?q=The+End ... e&ie=UTF-8

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