Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus || Spoken Word

[Sara S]

Dixon, you sound a bit defensive yourself here; I never meant to "infer really stupid positions" that you didn't take.

Here's a bit of my story: My parents sent me to Catholic schools starting with fourth grade, because they thought I'd get a better education; I did, along with the intense proselytising they did then. By the seventh grade I was convinced that if I didn't convert I would go straight to hell; I did my own version of persuasion, but my father wouldn't agree for another year, and I was baptized the day before the 8th grade graduation (this part of my education did give me some insight into suicide bombers, since I thought then that the best thing that could happen to me would be if someone pointed a gun at my head and said, "Renounce Jesus, or die." I would die, of course, and so go straight to heaven.)

But the religious instructions offered to converts left some of my questions unanswered, and soon after (age 14) I was introduced to the devil weed by my first (wrong-side-of-the-tracks) boyfriend. I began to see things differently, and by the time I started college I was pretty much an atheist. One of the classes in my first semester was Philosophy 1A, and the instructor decided that we would spend the semester on The Republic. Here's a moment I'll never forget: I was in the library with a copy of the Republic on one side and a dictionary on the other; I had to go back and forth at what seemed like every other word, and all of a sudden I had the horrifying realization that there was no way I was ever going to be able to know everything. I was 17, and sort of surprised that I'd (subconsciously, I guess) thought that I could learn everything there was to know.

When I read "Be Here Now" a little door opened to another realm of knowledge, recounted by a believable man. Many years and a lot of life later, I began studying the I Ching and reading some Buddhist texts ("Entry into the Realm of Reality", translated by Thomas Cleary, is probably the most important), and they tell me that omniscience is an attribute of enlightenment. So there IS a way I can know everything! And, from what I understand, I don't have to be as brilliant as, say, you are, in order for that to happen.

That's all I meant.

Your admirer,

Sara

Thank you.


Sara, where in the hell is that coming from? If you think anything I've ever, ever said implies that, you're really confused! In fact, my engaging people in discussions like this (even though they can become uncomfortable) represents my attempt to learn something. Specifically in this case, I'm trying to learn whether the propositions put forth by Nathan are true or false.

Often I find that people are very uncomfortable with the challenging of claims that is part of dialogical reasoning. Sometimes their defense against that discomfort involves nasty defense mechanisms like ad hominem attacks on whoever is challenging the beliefs, or straw figure attacks in which they distort someone's message into something less reasonable than it really is. I urge you to do some introspection and see if your apparent desire to infer really stupid positions that I didn't really take might be such a defense mechanism.

Your friend;
Dixon

[Dixon]

When I read "Be Here Now" a little door opened to another realm of knowledge, recounted by a believable man. Many years and a lot of life later, I began studying the I Ching and reading some Buddhist texts ("Entry into the Realm of Reality", translated by Thomas Cleary, is probably the most important), and they tell me that omniscience is an attribute of enlightenment. So there IS a way I can know everything!

Sara, I too was influenced by Be Here Now (which I read on acid, making it very influential indeed, LOL!) as well as Taoism (I especially like the Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English translation of the Tao Te Ching) and Buddhist (especially Zen) texts, among other influences, notably Alan Watts. But just because a book or a tradition has some good ideas doesn't mean we should switch off our bullshit detector and believe everything they say. The claim that anyone has ever been or could ever be omniscient is just ludicrous. (Of course, if you have any evidence for that claim, I'm open to being shown I'm wrong. And when you attain your omniscience, I have lots of questions I wanna ask you!)

[jbox]

Mark Twain, whose ability to distill complex, nettlesome, and enduring human conundrums into a single sentence still just totally astounds me, said of religion: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." Some other gems by Twain: "It is best to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain." "Religion consists in a certain set of things which the average man thinks he believes, and wishes he was certain." "If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be - a Christian." "A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows." "Go to heaven for climate and hell for society." "Man is a marvelous curiosity....He thinks he is the creator's pet....He even believes the Creator loves him, sits up nights to admires him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea?"

[Dixon]

...what I am pointing to really is beyond the mind...

No it's not. Any time you reach a conclusion about anything (such as your claim that the individual self is illusory or unreal, or that nothingness has awareness and intention), you are in the realm of the mind. Conclusions are productions of the mind, though not necessarily unconnected from things outside your mind. The question is whether the conclusions we express are true or mistaken.

It is a matter of direct experience. You could never describe or argue for the existence of a particular flower's smell...

Wrong! Both the objective existence of molecules in the air which we experience as smell and the subjective experience of smelling can be described, and you could also make evidence-based arguments for or against the presence of an objective flower-smell as opposed to an imagined one. It's also possible to make true or false statements about whether we smelled something, whether the thing we smelled was what we thought it was, whether the whole experience was a hallucination or actual evidence of the presence of a real flower, etc.

One's experience cannot be refuted by logic.

What I keep saying and you keep evading, Nathan, is that I'm not critiquing anyone's experience; I'm critiquing the conclusions you've reached. I'm insisting that our conclusions don't come directly from experience but instead represent some reasoning process which is fallible; therefore we can always be mistaken. (For more on this important issue, see my column here.) If the best we can do by way of supporting our conclusions is to say "I know it from experience and I couldn't possibly be wrong", we probably are mistaken. You're an articulate guy, Nathan. There is no good reason you can't give some description, at least a metaphorical one, of the specific experiences you've had which you interpret as meaning that the individual self is illusory, and that nothingness has awareness and intention. If all you can say is "I can't describe the experience but I'm sure of what it means", all you're saying is that you're accepting a strong feeling of certainty as proof, and guess what--it ain't!

My experience trumps your theories about my experience.

Again you miss the point that it's not my theories versus your experience; it's my theories versus your theories. Statements like "individual self is illusory" or "nothingness has awareness and intention" are not experiences, nor even descriptions of experiences; they're theories you've come up with which you think are implied by your experience. They may or may not be true, in spite of your apparent position that, at least regarding these theories, you're infallible.

If you have investigated and still find the separate self to be real, you haven't taken it far enough. It's not a matter of the number of hours you put into it, it's a matter of the results you get.

Nathan, thanks for clarifying that your criterion for determining whether someone is right about this stuff is the self-centered criterion of whether they agree with you, LOL!

If I had stopped after the first year, or the second, or the 10th, I would never have the experience I am describing to you now....there is little I can do...except report my experience and let my words land where they may.

But Nathan, you haven't described nor reported your experience at all--only the conclusions you'd like to think are implied by your experience.
One more thing: for a somewhat in-depth consideration of the non-illusory nature of objective reality, see my other column here.

P.S. Are you paying attention, Karin?

[NathanSW]

Wow, I thought I lost this argument a long time ago. Glad to see it's been on your mind. Let's try this again:

What this whole exchange reminds me of is the many, many stories out there of seekers and skeptics basically saying, "Explain this shit to me so that my mind can understand it," to which the response is always completely unsatisfying to the querent's mind. It cannot be helped; that which is beyond the mind cannot be understood by the mind, no matter how much it insists that it can be. Your mind is a wonderful tool, and it is one of your greatest strengths, but it has its limits. This should be self-evidently true. It can evaluate experience up to a certain point, but it is important to be cognizant of what that point is and not to try to use the mind once you've gotten beyond that point. Otherwise, it's like trying to use a microscope to study the heavens, or a telescope to see subatomic particles. It just doesn't work, but if you insist that it does, you will conclude that there are no stars because the microscope can't see them, and likewise that there are no subatomic particles because the telescope cannot show them to you.

So yes, there are some interpretations of my experiences that I've given to you, because I wanted to find a way for you to relate to and understand what I'm talking about. But without interpretation, at its base there is simply an experience of recognition that one's self is not real. I fully accept that I could be wrong, but I also accept that certainty of anything is impossible, so it's not a problem for me to accept that recognition for what it appears to be, and for me, what it most likely actually is.

In my personal experience, everything that I ever thought of as "me" has shown itself to be either a piece of conditioning or a self-sustaining identity. When you let go of some piece of identity or conditioning, yet you don't actually die, something inside says, "Huh. I really thought that was me but I guess I'm not that." Then it happens again, and again, and again. The more it happens, the more "ripe" the person becomes for a more monumental shift in which the whole house of cards falls apart -- where not only are the various pieces of identity seen as being "not-me" but the basis for identity itself -- the "I" -- is seen as "not-me". When that happens, nothing comes in to replace that sense of false identity. All that is left is emptiness, and life goes on. What's more, for myself and for many people who have had similar experiences, there is a realization that you actually always knew that the "I" wasn't you, but such knowledge had been forgotten or suppressed somehow. In any case, from here, life is not only a lot more peaceful and enjoyable, but it is also much easier to see where others are creating suffering for themselves because they are still identified with the idea of who they are, and such suffering would end if they could just let go of that identified self.

This is not a new idea, it's a whole paradigm shift. From the paradigm of mind and individual self, it will never make any sense. It's like trying to tell a Christian fundamentalist that humans evolved from other primates -- as long as they are in their paradigm of the Bible being the source of some literal, transcendent truth, every piece of evidence presented to them will be evaluated through that filter, and so the bones of dinosaurs become "tests of faith," etc. Nothing can shake such a world-view if it refuses to be shaken, because everything can be re-interpreted in a way that supports the paradigm. But sometimes people do snap out of it. Something breaks and they have a moment of clarity or recognition -- the truth somehow breaks through the noise, and they can see that they had been missing something important the entire time that they were convinced that they were right, and a more rational basis for understanding life finally becomes possible.

But that is not the end of the road; a similar dynamic happens in regards to what I am talking about. You can continue to re-interpret everything I'm saying through the paradigm/filter of mind and identity, and in doing so it will always appear that you are right. But getting to what I'm talking about requires a willingness to put the mind aside, because that is how you create enough space in which to notice your more fundamental essence. You have to stop interpreting everything through the mind and its need for certainty, and investigate your own nature for yourself. You may never have that moment where the "I" is no longer seen as real, but if you stop evaluating my words through any mental filter, and instead allow your innate ability to recognize the truth of things, you may see that what I'm saying has a certain "ring of truth" to it that bears further investigation. In the world of science and material atheism, we are taught to distrust such feelings, largely because they are seen as no better than the kind of irrational emotional reactions that inhibit authentic inquiry, but there is a difference. One comes from the ego's desire to protect itself and the reality it has created to feel safe; the other comes from our authentic self, which is beyond ego and is absolutely capable of recognizing the truth when it sees it. That is what I have been trying to point your awareness to, however ineptly, and that is honestly the best and only way to help you see what I see.

Peace my friend,
Nathan