Om

I cannot tell you how many times I have sat out in the middle of the woods and spoken to God, yet I've never received an answer that I was 100 percent no doubt a reply The closest thing (and this is not a joke in the least) to a reply was getting poo'd on by a bird. I will say I have honestly given God several chances to be in my life at different times of my life. There have been many times when I asked for help and was granted with silence.
Please don't take this as an effort to shoot your statement down- I am glad that there are folks like you that believe strongly and know God. This would be a horrible world with a bunch of people like me.

In my experience most atheists I know come from backgrounds where they had religion forced upon them by strict religious families and that is what ultimately drove them away from religion.

Nik -- compelling blog. And even though I am irreligious myself, I think that your critique of humanity as demanding a spiritual presence writ large is fair. We are brought up in a culture of doubt, which while it has merits in some areas of life, it can drain the spirit of many.

It's funny but I'm reminded of something my former boss (when I worked in marketing) told me about people: "When in doubt, they will always believe bad news".

Nice blog Nic. We should all be thankful, though i will say you are somewhat romantizing. Are you saying that animals don't die of starvation? Religion needs to absorb and understand all aspects of life, even the the negative things. Bad things do happen to people and they happen to good people as well as bad.


Funny, Dark Muse. Most atheists I know are from backgrounds that had no religious upbringing.

Originally Posted by Virgil

Funny, Dark Muse. Most atheists I know are from backgrounds that had no religious upbringing.

Haha funny, though me and my sister have unconventional beliefs, we both are a far cry from being atheists and we were raised in a secular home. My parents did not believe in influencing their children with a particular religious dogma.

Speaking from a religious view point, I can't move into that place were I can say I am humble enough and happy enough to be dependent on God. Yes, I believe in the concept, but don't embrace it. We do need to be proactive to make our existence as God envisions it. I say, f8ck it, it's too hard.

[QUOTE=skib;bt42791]I cannot tell you how many times I have sat out in the middle of the woods and spoken to God, yet I've never received an answer that I was 100 percent no doubt a reply The closest thing (and this is not a joke in the least) to a reply was getting poo'd on by a bird. I will say I have honestly given God several chances to be in my life at different times of my life. There have been many times when I asked for help and was granted with silence.
Please don't take this as an effort to shoot your statement down- I am glad that there are folks like you that believe strongly and know God. This would be a horrible world with a bunch of people like me.[/QUOTE]

God is the absolute - Om - and God is the source of everything. At night you cannot see the sun, but do you think the sun doesn't exist?

I can understand your position, I used to hold it too, but I can tell you that God is real. I have a friend now who says that he thinks - about religion, the soul, God, etc. - we cannot know, and it's wrong for anyone to say they know. I do not know how to reply to this. Actually it is illogical.

Atheists say that it is illogical to say that God, that an infinite, exists. But we can see in mathematics for example, that the infinite exists. Let us say we are dealing with basic math. We never see any sign of the infinite. But later in trigonometry, we can find solid proofs of the existence of infinity, even though we cannot write the number down. Spiritually it's rather like that too, although it's more difficult to figure it all out.

You know I can honestly say I have never been poo'd on by a bird. :) And it's not for lack for being outside.

Actually God alone is real. Everything else is illusion, it is merely nothing. Now, we are separated from God by illusion. And God is simultaneously farther away from us than anything, and yet closer to us than anything. God is farther away from us than anything because God is infinite; and yet God is closer to us than anything because we are not separated from God by anything. We are hopelessly in illusion - let me clarify this -

What I mean to say is that God, the reality, is infinite, pure love; or existence-consciousness-bliss. So you were asking for God to answer you. I can tell you what my experience has been, if I were to put it into words. And it is not just a message received from somewhere else, but one that was known absolutely and completely, on all levels of my being: "Be at peace. Everything comes from Me. No matter what happens, be at peace." It's hard to say this... what I felt was that no matter what, no matter absolutely anything, there was never any reason to worry, never any reason for doubt or anxiety. What is the reason for this? Because our whole conditioned existence is based on an illusion, an illusion of "I." We fear, we doubt, we defend, we experience anxiety and distress, all for no reason. We are defending an "I" that doesn't exist, that never suffers. Skib, I can't really convey this any better than this, but believe me when I tell you this is true.

Anyway, God is also so near to us. We are separated from God by illusion, but that illusion itself is nothing. There is a state at which numerless sages and seers have reached - self-realization - where they realized that they were never bound. They were always the soul, which was never bound. "The self slays not nor is slain."

The nature of the soul is divine. It is pure love.

I hope that helps, or that you read it. Sorry it took so long to reply.

[QUOTE=Virgil;bt42797]Nice blog Nic. We should all be thankful, though i will say you are somewhat romantizing. Are you saying that animals don't die of starvation? Religion needs to absorb and understand all aspects of life, even the the negative things. Bad things do happen to people and they happen to good people as well as bad.[/QUOTE]

Ha, don't you recognize it, Virgil? It's from the Bible, as well as the Bhagavatam.

Anyway, I won't argue with you but wish you well on your own path. Although I will say that our ideas of good and bad are relative - in other words, relative to ourselves. If I lose my life, I consider that bad. But it may not really affect the harmony of the whole. Actually there is nothing to fear, not even death. Death is just the releasing of the soul from the body, not the ending of the soul.

True that is biblical, but that's not the totality of the bible. Thank you and I wish you well too.

Well, I'm none too good at math, nor do I think I have the mental capability to even start to wrap my mind around what you are telling me. However, you know what you know, and I have no reason to doubt it.

Actually, I think the real humility is admitting that God is not in fact "doing everything, proving absolutely everything for you," but rather that belief in God is based on something completely different from evidence. There's no value in belief in God if there's undeniable evidence that He exists, loves you, and awaits your turning to Him.

The claim that religious belief represents humility has always amused me. It seems a lot more humble to admit that we don't know whether God is real or not. We don't actually know anything about this being whom we ascribe such human traits. We overstate our importance in the scheme of things by assuming that there's a God that cares about humanity.

Regards,

Istvan

Istvan, all of what you said comes from the complete conviction you are correct. What it doesn't account for is direct experience of the divine, which, I will admit, most have not had.

And the other part of it, the theological part, that comes from Hinduism. To understand it you really must practice it. The purpose of practicing Hinduism is to become free from the pangs and dualities of material existence. It is a science, also, and the other side effect is a gradual enlightenment. It's an experiment and you have to practice it and follow the same steps to get the same results.

What you are saying, that we must say we don't know, is the same thing as a friend of mine is saying recently. He says this, that we don't know and [I]we can't know.[/I] But I will agree with Swami Vivekananda in saying that it is hypocrisy to speak of the soul if one has not perceived it, or to speak of God if one has not perceived Him. But by the same token it is hypocrisy to say that I have not experienced the divine consciousness if I have. And I have, and I will tell you or anyone if you wish to know.

And I incidentally found it it to be identical to the descriptions from the Vedas, from some of the Hindu saints, such as Ramakrishna and others. It is also nearly identical to Buddhist sutras like the Prajna-Paramitam Hrdaya Sutra, the essence of buddha-nature. Buddha nature is the same thing as the nature of Devas, or demigods.

That is not proof - my own experience was proof for me though not for others - but I have also read the same things in the Tao To Ching, and I've found places of Alan Watt's writings where he described verily the exact same thing...


[quote]The more prosaic, the more dreadfully ordinary anyone or anything seems to be, the more I am moved to marvel at the ingenuity with which divinity hides in order to seek itself, at the lengths to which this cosmic joie de vivre will go in elaborating its dance. I think of a corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes, the regular Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards halfheartedly gaudy, the flatness so reassuring—nothing around here but just us folks! I can see people just pretending not to see that they are avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, that the cells of their bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a haze of jewels. How solemnly they would go through the act of not understanding me if I were to step up and say, "Well, who do you think you're kidding? Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't fool me." But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that divine organ, the body, is only pretending to be.* When people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his eye speaks to the unconscious—"You know....You know!"[/quote]

In the above quote, the part which was the same as what I experienced was the part about the cells of the body being millions of gods.

I may give just three examples from persons who are more intelligent than I... Pascal said, a man who has a true idea knows he has a true idea; Laoze said, in the Tao Te Ching, I know it is true because I look within and see it is true; and R.W. Emerson wrote, "Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty."