Lokesh, have you met someone?”

The people who appear most suspicious to me are the ones who do not express doubt. I had a run-in with a Protestant minister in Scotland a few years back. At one point he said in a very assured voice, “I have the Lord on my side.” He was so sure about what he was saying I thought to myself, “what an arrogant asshole.” The fundamentalists are the worst.

I know a lot and have certain understandings about the nature of life. I also experience doubt. One thing for sure, there is not too much certainty in life. I am fine with that.

Lokesh, have you met someone?

Can even the spiritual service providers be dead sure that their wheel of life is not going to take a spin or a tumble wash?

In that sense, agnostic mind-set has better position: “I am trying my best but can´t say about the final outcome.”

You nailed it, Frank.

However, there is an art of presenting issues and an art of listening on the side of the receivers, in my experience transforming ´competition´ into something like an evolutionary impulse.

Rare are those who know to present issues beyond the energy of power plays and obvious or more hidden apparently competitive comparison.

And rare are those who know to listen; who listen (or read) without sharpening their mental weapons while apparently using their ears (and eyes) at the same time with the weapons of contradiction to what is presented.

If both quite rare phenomena are coming together, an evolutionary impulse might be happening.
Individually as collectively.

No forecast of a result possible though.

We used to call it a Buddhafield.
It’s indeed a mystical happening, just to indicate the ´Unknowable´.

Madhu

P.S:
And Frank, don´t be shy to send further ´diagnosis´ re my writings into the chat here, if you feel so….

Industrial age Salford the size of China – what a thought!

Beam me up, Scotty!

The answer to that is for me answered best by Gurdjieff. In the natural progression of a human life there comes a point where the outer, ego, is sacrificed for the inner, spiritual essence. That is, if a certain level of self-awareness has been created.

If this progression takes place, real spiritual evolution can happen. If not, as is normally the case, the wheel of life takes a spin and you end up back where you started, even taking into account that the you we are talking about is a fiction. Simple as that.

In fact, science/medicine and religion, including the new age are, in many ways, competing faiths locked in a power struggle.

To “escape the Lowryesque mechanics of society” as Big P says, it is most likely necessary to be able to navigate in and around both with care, and as you say, trust yourself.

“To fail as a human being is to accept someone else`s description of oneself.”

Highlighting one part of Parmartha’s take on” higher mystical forces” is a good example of your insight.

On the one hand, I agree with you, such phrases have all the hallmarks of woolly thinking and can be very confusing.

It’s the sort of term that Christians and other religionists might use to mystify and confuse. It might also be used by Islam to justify all sorts of madness in the name of faith.
So I’m with you in wishing to seek other ways to explain life.

In some ways I’m an empiricist, wanting to see and test, rather than believe. It seems like a good starting point – to test out, to be scientific and disbelieving.

On the other hand, the empiricist can only experiment to a certain extent. They don’t ever, for example, seem to be able to prove or disprove that ghosts exist, yet people, otherwise quite sensible and down to earth, have experienced ghosts. So the way of the empiricist is only partly useful.

And the rationalists, who often hide behind so-called empiricism, often come across as deeply suspicious and antagonistic to things they don’t understand rather than open and curious.

So, as they dismiss things like faith, and suggest that one day, in the future, we might understand the truth about ghosts, for example. “One day” – being an excuse for saying that science will find a way to explain something, it’s just that we don’t yet have the tools or the science to ‘explain’ it today.

So how do we deal with matters of faith, mystery or the unknown?
I only know that I find myself sympathetic to both sides of the argument at times. Those who have a sense of real curiosity and are willing to change their minds seem a lot more likeable than those who take a position, wherever they stand on the spectrum of science vs. faith.
I guess you might say in any one moment I discover my position and how I feel about the argument.

And I trust that.