Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

Oct 14, 2019, 9:29 PM FAITH Faith is a fairly easy thing to explain. In other words we know what causes the feeling we call ‘spirituality’ and why it’s so influential to some and not at all to others. But we can’t introspect into it. So you can’t introspect into how you raise your arm. And you can’t introspect into the feeling you get from faith, but that doesn’t mean we cant explain how you raise your arm (I certainly can) or that we can’t explain the feeling of faith (I certainly can). It’s that the ‘magic’ is due to our inability to introspectively analyze it. There are some tricks we can use (visual illusions) to experiment with vision. There are similar tricks for spirituality. The feeling is not complicated. The free association we can conduct in that state is not complicated. And mastering the ability to freely associate emotionally by repetitive practice is not complicated. So whether you specialize in pre-rational emotion, pre-rational intuition, physical performance, or rational thought, or rational calculation, is just a matter of your ability and interest. And your developmental arc since that series is simply the developmental hierarchy. And just as there are many fragile points in your sexual development there are many fragile points in your social development there are also many fragile points in your cognitive development, and some of us are biased to the sensory, to the motor, to the social, to the verbal rational, and some to the calculative spatial. It’s not that faith isn’t an excellent way of developing mindfulness by supplying your own sedation. It’s not that the buddhist meditation and philosophy isn’t. Or the stoic. It’s that there are consequences (costs) for each of those methods and only the stoic produces your adaptation rather than avoidance.

Oct 14, 2019, 9:29 PM FAITH Faith is a fairly easy thing to explain. In other words we know what causes the feeling we call ‘spirituality’ and why it’s so influential to some and not at all to others. But we can’t introspect into it. So you can’t introspect into how you raise your arm. And you can’t introspect into the feeling you get from faith, but that doesn’t mean we cant explain how you raise your arm (I certainly can) or that we can’t explain the feeling of faith (I certainly can). It’s that the ‘magic’ is due to our inability to introspectively analyze it. There are some tricks we can use (visual illusions) to experiment with vision. There are similar tricks for spirituality. The feeling is not complicated. The free association we can conduct in that state is not complicated. And mastering the ability to freely associate emotionally by repetitive practice is not complicated. So whether you specialize in pre-rational emotion, pre-rational intuition, physical performance, or rational thought, or rational calculation, is just a matter of your ability and interest. And your developmental arc since that series is simply the developmental hierarchy. And just as there are many fragile points in your sexual development there are many fragile points in your social development there are also many fragile points in your cognitive development, and some of us are biased to the sensory, to the motor, to the social, to the verbal rational, and some to the calculative spatial. It’s not that faith isn’t an excellent way of developing mindfulness by supplying your own sedation. It’s not that the buddhist meditation and philosophy isn’t. Or the stoic. It’s that there are consequences (costs) for each of those methods and only the stoic produces your adaptation rather than avoidance.