That was very nicely stated aryavazhi; I agree that with you about metaphors; for myself the religious metaphors simply did not work as well as some others, but as you must have experienced, there are those for whom religious metaphors are the only thing that gets their attention. I think I understand them, but it is a torturous path for me to do so. For me the 'spiritual quest' began with an experience that was not in a religious environment, and very impersonal, so finding metaphors (which in the early days means: getting sucked into certain concepts) that resonated with me was an interesting task. The other day I was reading about Zeus and Mt. Olympus and was wondering how the ancient Greeks who were more spiritually, as opposed to religiously inclined, might have interpreted this story metaphorically in terms of their experience. It is as good a story as any, as all such stories have their particular insanity about them.
I tend to think of the verbal attempt to describe spiritual experience as a cracked surface, like a jigsaw puzzle or a broken egg shell. When the surface is whole it is smooth and connected. When broken, dark lines separate the pieces. The pieces are the concepts we overlay on experience, the dark lines represent logic which knits together the fragments into the smooth whole. But when the concepts are faulty or the logic is faulty, the pieces do not fit together correctly, and it seems ultimately there is some fundamental flaw in attempting to amalgamate wholeness in this way on the level of thinking, so eventually such attempts are seen as metaphors, similes, and analogies, rather than 'truth', and once that is experienced half the battle is done; the attempt at verbal mental precision is found to be creating an obscuring fog of its own. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : I concur with everything you say Xeno, except, that I will be more tolerant, and less uncompromising, than you, to the needs of the ignorant - which also includes myself. I agree with you,wrt the transcendental, the ground, whatever it is or is not, but I also allow myself to be vague with this concept, that is clearly situated in ignorance, which you call 'the man in the sky'. For me, these concepts, all of them, are metaphors, they can be very lively metaphors, life-metaphors as such, and since they are common in our culture, I can use them for my own private porposes. I don't have this ethos - clearly some of you seem to have here - the sort of iconoclastic rigor to eliminate any trace of irrationality they could detect in their own subconscious. So what? I don't care. If god intercats with the world, or not, if he/she/it is in my own subconscious or not, what does it matter? Maybe there is a difference, in not being an American, where religion seems to hold a more prominent place in public life, here, in the Germany, evolution is taught in schools, along with religion, as Salyavin said, the pope acknowledges the Big Bang (something Einstein actually tried to avoid to prove, but nevertheless did), all this is not a problem to me. In India, the creator god has very little to say, in gnosticism, the creator god is actually 'bad', in Buddhism and Jainism, there is no creation at all, there is only an eternal cycle, and yet there are various personified Buddhas, Bhodisattvas, or Tirthankars, in Advaita Ishvara is only a reflection of the impersonal Brahman within maya, illusion. As such, and very traditionally, they are only regarded as stepping stones to a higher reality, that cannot be described by words. If you, as a human consciousness, can experience this, in various degrees, reflect it, like a mirror, or recreate the image of it, I really don't care either. I also don't believe that any scripture, neither the Bible nor the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gita, are the creation of any god, rather the have all been written down by human beings, and they could reflect a variety of spiritual experiences, theological thoughts, or political agendas. They serve as a canvas for later interpretations, as an archive of allegories, that have been built on them lateron, by either spiritualists, theologians, philosphers or simply poets, and it would be wrong to dismiss them all because of their stone age canvas. This is what I call reductionist simplifications. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Buried in all this is a basic conundrum, related to ideas of god and ideas of consciousness: How does something that is alleged to be transcendent and not physical interact with the physical world or can direct the functioning of the physical world; how can it have anything to do with the concept of will? And in addition were these things considered to be physical, the whole mystical aspect of gods and awareness goes down the toilet; the mystique as it were, is flushed out. The invisible man in the sky is an attempt to create that mystique of ineffability while preserving the sense that this phantasm can interact with the world just as we seem to be able to do. It is an attempt to bridge two supposedly distinct modes of existence that have nothing in common using characteristics of our own personalities to mentally meld the concepts together in our minds, however illogical that may be, but it tends to work because human thought and memory is intimately tied in with human emotive responses to situations, and emotions often easily ride herd over logic and common sense reasoning. We take a concept of infinitely rarefied being which is essentially the equivalent of nothing, divide it from the world and place it in a metaphysical space and imbue it with our human characteristics so we can pretend it is something and can do things as a magnified version of our persona. Then we forget we were playing 'let's pretend'. We create something that is logically isolated and out of reach, but that does not satisfy the emotions or the mind, because we like to connect emotively and intellectually, we like things to fit together. This is the myth that drives religious longings and the desire for enlightenment, to connect it all back together, whatever we have set apart from ourselves. The job of the guru, the priest, the shaman, the rabbi, etc., is to infect us with the myth, and then tell us how to knit it all back into a single fabric. This is the confidence game. We are the chumps. The problem is the middle man in this transaction doesn't have a job if the infected mind gets wind of the truth of the situation. The supplier of the poison and the antidote are found in the same person. In a religion, the antidote is indefinitely delayed. In a spiritual path the gap between illness and cure might fall within the span of a human lifetime. If it does not, there are other stories that have been made up to keep you happy when you die a failure. The real purpose of 'a path of enlightenment' is to reset the mind so that it sees clearly that all such scenarios are untrue, that the disintegration of reality into separate modes of existence is a false understanding, and when the mind settles into this understanding with sufficient rigour, it will not again fall into the same and similar traps. This is called liberation or freedom, but it is not really, because nothing is changed other than a mental delusion has been righted.
