What Form Of Spirituality Do You Study/practice These Days?

[DesertBob]

And that's the irony of libertarianism. If everyone was a libertarian, the world would be a better place, but in order to do so, you'd have to force everyone to become a libertarian, which would in effect destroy everything libertarianism stands for. The same holds true in religious free thinking.

Indeed.

 

People construct a worldview that makes their lives rationalizable to them. To the extent my Rationalizer™ works differently from yours, it is difficult for you to respect my worldview, because it tends to deconstruct yours. Even if you say, "Bob, I understand where you're coming from but it's not for me", you're secretly thankful that not many people think like me because we would influence society in ways that would make you uncomfortable.

 

On the flip side this is why -isms and -anities like Christianity that happen to either resonate more widely or are at least possible to unify more people around their core, broad concepts, tend to gain dominance and then have such a strong hold upon their followers. A community of believers is the closest thing to a perfect world people can construct for themselves. As soon as you start following evidence and practice where they lead to truth and/or results and/or consonance with actual reality, you are on your own. Truth is often uncomfortable and ugly. People by and large don't really want truth, they just want their lives to "work", and often only in the short term at the expense of the long term. They just want to be "happy", whatever precisely that is. I have often said that if the illusions of Christianity had actually delivered on even half their promises I would probably still be running with it. Most people's standards are even lower than mine, they only need to successfully KID themselves that half the illusions work. Hence the saying, "would you rather be right, or happy".

 

To address some of the other posts in this thread, I believe that happiness has no positive definition. What has a positive existence and is much easier to define, is unhappiness. Happiness is naught but the absence of unhappiness. Unhappiness is the impedance mismatch between what you expect and what you get. The two ways to reduce unhappiness -- the only two ways -- are to lower your expectations or to improve your circumstances (or some combination of the two). Depending on your view of free will, our ability to improve our circumstances is rather limited, particularly when we're not in a big community of like minded folk working for common goals; but we can lower our expectations to basically zero. Eliminate unhappiness, and you are happy.

 

What most people consider happiness is the successful pursuit of pleasure, but due to hedonic adaptation this is an illusion and the most charitable thing you can say about it is that it's not sustainable.

 

The pattern I keep seeing with people here is they adapt some version of the Buddhist concept of letting go of expectations, or -- call it what you will, letting go of self in favor of Self, whatever -- and while I find this difficult to pull off reliably I see no real alternatives. Bob must decrease, and What Is must have its way. Because it will get its way, with or without Bob's acquiescence, anyway. Bob never actually has had a life. It was stillborn anyway. Long live reality. We are but its servants.

[VacuumFlux]

Unhappiness is the impedance mismatch between what you expect and what you get. The two ways to reduce unhappiness -- the only two ways -- are to lower your expectations or to improve your circumstances (or some combination of the two).

...

 

The pattern I keep seeing with people here is they adapt some version of the Buddhist concept of letting go of expectations, or -- call it what you will, letting go of self in favor of Self, whatever -- and while I find this difficult to pull off reliably I see no real alternatives. Bob must decrease, and What Is must have its way. Because it will get its way, with or without Bob's acquiescence, anyway. Bob never actually has had a life. It was stillborn anyway. Long live reality. We are but its servants.

 

I tend to think of it more as letting go of unreasonable expectations so that I can direct my limited energy into improving my circumstances in the most efficient way possible. Like I have a hard time accepting that my parents will never love me for who I am and that the best I can hope for is them loving me despite who I am. As long as I have unreasonable expectations of their love, I stress out about coming out to them because I'm afraid of loosing something that I've never really had. Once I quit lying to myself and admit that the whole situation sucks, then I can work on figuring out a least-bad course of action. So yes, I would agree that Buddhist type meditation does make my happier by lowering my expectations, but that would be pretty depressing if I didn't also have the hope that doing so lets me use the power that I do have over my life more effectively.

[DesertBob]

I tend to think of it more as letting go of unreasonable expectations so that I can direct my limited energy into improving my circumstances in the most efficient way possible. Like I have a hard time accepting that my parents will never love me for who I am and that the best I can hope for is them loving me despite who I am. As long as I have unreasonable expectations of their love, I stress out about coming out to them because I'm afraid of loosing something that I've never really had. Once I quit lying to myself and admit that the whole situation sucks, then I can work on figuring out a least-bad course of action. So yes, I would agree that Buddhist type meditation does make my happier by lowering my expectations, but that would be pretty depressing if I didn't also have the hope that doing so lets me use the power that I do have over my life more effectively.

The devil in the details is how you define "reasonable". Countless times in my life, I've said, okay, my expectations were unreasonable. How silly and immature of me to expect X. I will divide X by 10 and expect that instead. And it STILL turns out to be unreasonable. To the point where my life has long since become something that would have kept me awake nights in my younger days, if I had known it was coming. I'm to the point now where I think almost any expectation is unreasonable. Some day it's quite possible I won't even be able to expect to wake up in the morning and take a dump without it being some kind of difficult and unpleasant project.

 

What's unreasonable, for instance, about wanting and hoping to simply reproduce the intact stable family unit I grew up in? Yet I could not. SInce that was my main ambition by far, it's all been over but the shouting ever since I figured out sometime in my twenties that that wasn't happening. I've learned to be flexible but accepting second, third, and thirtieth choices starts to feel less like flexibility than weakness after awhile.

 

I have in front of me right now, some assorted bric-a-brac I'm sorting out for disposal at my old house, and here's a pewter serving dish with the following inscribed around its circumference: HEALTH - LOVE - AND WEALTH - AND TIME TO ENJOY THEM. What's bad or unreasonable about that? It's a simple sentiment that my late 2nd wife apparently once thought reasonable, given that she bought or held on to that dish, and now it's going into the dumpster, so I guess it wasn't reasonable for HER. I can certainly attest that the health, love and wealth in my life has been spotty and seldom intersecting and now I'm running low on time, too.

 

Look, I'm not as morose as I sound ... truth has many facets but I refuse not to look at the unpleasant ones because they, too, are part of life, and I will not go quietly into that good night with zero protest about how ignoble or unrealistic it supposedly is to simply want, particularly past middle age, to have a little of the ease that life is always holding forth as the prize for those who diligently do their duty. Oprah was interviewing George Lucas on her new TV network recently and he said something that struck me, about the difficulties of film making. He said sometimes you just trudge one step at a time through difficulties and eventually you find your way out of the swamp. And he's right, at least generally. But what he didn't bother to mention was that you find your way out of the swamp only to find your way into the next one. It's just one swamp after another. I'm reaching the point in life where I realize it. never. ends. And that's simply Not Right. Not unless we want to abandon all our high sounding ideals about Human Dignity™ at any rate.

 

Now to your point: yes, your parent's limitations are what they are and beyond a certain point you just have to accept them, limitations and all, which is, in fact, what you want them to do for you, were they able. And you're also right that you can't really mourn what you never actually had in the first place. On the other hand you are clearly an intelligent and caring human being who deserves so much more than you actually got, and I bear witness to that and it's wrong, wrong, wrong. Granted, the universe is indifferent and could care less but if it means anything to be human, we humans need to care, and I don't know how to care and not be indignant, that's all. I'm indignant on your behalf. I'm indignant on my behalf. I'm indignant on my late wife's behalf because her father abandoned her as a child, on my fiancee's behalf because her mother went insane and died when she was nine, and left her with an emotionally crippled father who had no clue and left her in the care of hirelings. If I have no expectations for any of these situations then I'm less than human.

 

Life is, at bottom, a ridiculous, insane, irrational proposition. We have the sunk cost that we're here and there is beauty and redeeming things to be found given that fact, but that we have to put up with and do without the things that we do, is nutso. Feral children who have to raise themselves, in the modern world? Nutso. Children who just want present and supportive and understanding parenting so they don't have to work overtime to construct their own center ex nihilo? Nutso. Children who act on the expectations inculcated in them by every authority figure and mentor they know only to find it's a load of crap? Nutso. Insane. WTF.

 

Okay, I'll stop it now. I just have to get this out of my system every now and then. I now return you to your regular programming.

[traveller2]

loosly i am a pagan.It was somthing i dabbled in after christianity.I can't say as i have any theistic beliefs however

[NEWsong]

I am realizing that my thoughts and philosophy seems to be aligning with Taoism/Daoism in ways. I have found that on FB, I will "gravitate" and the words of Lao-Tzu "ring true" for me. Like this one...

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.Lao Tzu

 

Todd Rundgren wrote a song called "Love is the Answer" and one line says "ASK the man, "in your heart" for the answer".

[Voice]

Mine's quite ambiguous. I listen to all theological perspectives now and categorize them or try to.

I really like the Tree of Life ideas, they're natural and from my observations a very real description of the universe and life. I suppose in a multiverse you might have an orchard of trees.

 

With christianity behind, i've come to value life and believe that all life is sentient just as we are, that perceptions vary, but sentience permeates all. Who was that scientist who tried to prove animals don't have feelings or consciousness by nailing dogs to walls? I don't know his name.

When i think of spirituality i think of consciousness and the moment. I ponder, i wonder, i marvel. Can any of these be understood without the others? Moment, consciousness, spirituality... I can attach no theology to this.

 

As quantum physicists popularize ideas like those [sarcasm]revealed[/sarcasm] in The Secret, i question some of the things they say. They're elaborating on a form of spirituality/theology that i guess was common generations ago. I listen, some of it is plausible, but i don't go by it. Does it have a name yet? I think it does. Not sure what it is.

[Voice]

When I first left, I gravitated to Wicca/paganism/New Age. Then to zen and later to Aghora tantra. I also learned Reiki. 15 years ago, I was initiated into The Golden Dawn. 10 years ago, I became an initiate of the Ordo Templi Orientis. And now, I guess I've moved away from esoteric systems altogether. These days I'm more interested in observing how people worship or stimulate their spirituality. I started attending church services at a Church of Christ recently and although my old complaints against organized religion still stand, I'm fascinated by the people who attend. They see the same hypocrisy and double standards I see, but they feel compelled to continue going. Any suggestion their religion is misleading them is met with fierce resistance. Is it brainwashing or some other form of conditioning at work? Absolutely! But there is no denying that it works. At every service, I stand in awe if how deeply manipulated these people are. If only I knew how to influence people so profoundly, I'd make them all think for themselves against their own will.

 

...but then you wouldn't be able to march them to war.

[norton65ca]

not at all sure of anything right now but Pastafarianism is looking good. All Hail His Noodly Appendage!!!

[JoeCoastie]

I'm a Shaqist myself. I believe that first there was nothing then Shaq created a basketball and a goal from pure will. He then dunked the ball so hard it created the universe. Despite being the creator of all things Shaq disguises himself as a retired NBA legend. However there is a dark side. Kobe is the bringer of darkness and causes mankind to foul out of the game of life.

Shaq has shown us the way to wisdom in his rap albums and in the Shaq-Fu users manual. The film Kazaam did not use any special effects as the magic shown in the film were Shaq's true miracles.

[Rev R]

You know that Shaqism is rendered false by the Kareem Cosmological Argument. Praise Kareem being blessed by the intercepting fist.

[Zephie]

If I worship anything it is wisdom...the goddess that kind of "speaks" to me (not literally) is Saraswati. I do like to incorporate bits of paganism into my life and what not. I did a guided meditation recently; its purpose was to show who my patron goddess is. Saraswati came to mind. So to me, she is a symbol of wisdom (not mention music and the arts plus Swans are kick-ass!)

[JoeCoastie]

You know that Shaqism is rendered false by the Kareem Cosmological Argument. Praise Kareem being blessed by the intercepting fist.

Blasphemy! I see that Kobe has hardened your heart. It was Shaq who made it rain candy in Kazaam not Kareem. It was Shaq who rapped with Biggie in Can't Stop The Reign, not Kareem. And it was Shaq who defeated the mummy Sett Ra in Shaq-Fu.

[HanSoto]

From a philosophic standpoint I still appreciate some aspects of Christianity and what little I understand of Buddhism. I'm also interested in some of the New Age thought and Universalism.

[hereticzero]

I think mine is more of a naturalist approach to spiritualism, laws of nature operate the universe. I get a spiritual rush from being in the outdoors.

[ConureDelSol]

I am not quick to define spirituality, but in terms of if I believe there is a higher power I am an agnostic atheist. If there is any sort of God at all, I believe it is more like the God deism defines than anything. However, I have a serious want to get into Buddhism. I'm not sure what really defines one as a Buddhist (do you have to believe in reincarnation, etc.) but I would definitely like to learn more about it. If I ever work up the nerve to actually go to one of the few Buddhist groups in my area, maybe I can take the teachings to heart.

[Noggy]

I am not quick to define spirituality, but in terms of if I believe there is a higher power I am an agnostic atheist. If there is any sort of God at all, I believe it is more like the God deism defines than anything. However, I have a serious want to get into Buddhism. I'm not sure what really defines one as a Buddhist (do you have to believe in reincarnation, etc.) but I would definitely like to learn more about it. If I ever work up the nerve to actually go to one of the few Buddhist groups in my area, maybe I can take the teachings to heart.

 

Your signature and your want of buddhism contradict.

[Rev R]

Your signature and your want of buddhism contradict.

 

how so?

[Noggy]

Your signature and your want of buddhism contradict.

 

how so?

 

Seems to me that this is exactly opposite of everything about Buddhism.

 

"I wouldn't want to live my life knowing that my future was written, that my boundaries had been already set."

 

- Captain Jean-Luc Picard

[Antlerman]

Your signature and your want of buddhism contradict.

 

how so?

 

Seems to me that this is exactly opposite of everything about Buddhism.

 

"I wouldn't want to live my life knowing that my future was written, that my boundaries had been already set."

 

- Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Buddhism teaches that we are fated? That there are boundaries set we cannot cross? Not in my knowledge. That sounds like Christianity which say 'this far and no further', (Picard reference as well).

[Noggy]

Uh...

 

Karma?

[Antlerman]

But you can affect your karma? Good karma, bad karma?

[Noggy]

But you can affect your karma? Good karma, bad karma?

 

Not if you buy pratitya samipada.

[Deva]

Karma can be not only influenced, but ended.

[ConureDelSol]

*shrug*

 

My understanding of Buddhism is incredibly basic at this point so I have really no idea how karma and whatnot actually works. I am more interested in Buddhism for its teachings of compassion and helping to cope with anger and suffering. I wondered if it might help to deal with the anger I still have over my deconversion experience.

[Noggy]

*shrug*

 

My understanding of Buddhism is incredibly basic at this point so I have really no idea how karma and whatnot actually works. I am more interested in Buddhism for its teachings of compassion and helping to cope with anger and suffering. I wondered if it might help to deal with the anger I still have over my deconversion experience.

 

If you're into the idea of removing your suffering, then Buddhism is for you. Just don't go thinking that anything you do can ever matter.