In a message dated 9/18/2000 8:12:14 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
emlyn@one.net.au writes:
>
> I guess that talking about God at this level is a matter of aesthetics. I
> find it faintly distasteful to refer to my inspiration as coming from God;
> like eating burnt soup.
>
Well, hopefully you and I don't need to create a construct, or symbolic
metaphor, for where our "flow" or "energy" comes from. We exist quite
harmoniously with the idea of *ourselves* being the "source" of that
inspiration, or if you prefer, a "manifestation" or a "piece" of energy and
need no "purpose" higher than that! We don't *want* to be guided by some
outer mysterious power.
> I don't think there's any supernatural element to the inspiration/creative
> bits of the thought processes.
Yes, but if we are intelligent and connected, we must also live within the
realization that we are a part of a huge temporal network of beings and
things that we *cannot* influence and yet upon which our life's direction
depends. We can choose to see that as a "larger picture" or a tapestry, or
some other metaphor. If we are an intelligent mind, we want to harmonize with
that world, in order to make our own experience here more pleasing,
productive, whatever.
"God" becomes various symbols for describing that larger picture.
>Just nonlinear wet stuff, slapping together
> weird, disconnected ideas in weird, difficult to fathom ways, such that you
> can't explain the derivation to any useful degree.
Yes. We have these impulses, conflicting energies - wet stuff slapping
together, our organs (the brain being one of them) demanding different
things! How would early man explain these urges?
My point was merely to say that "god" did/does exist in the minds of millions
and millions of people - and to the extent that the belief influenced *them*
- so are you influenced by this experience. When the philosophers of Greece,
India, Japan, and the Old World created the languages you speak, the very
reality you live in, that logic you adore, the life you live ... they did so
*believing* that something guided them. Zen, Christian, Grecian, Hindu..
Depending on what myths are in play, there's a very REAL volition involved.
How you perceive these myths clearly involves "doing things".
God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. It is an idea that (getting
back to the original "overactive god module" idea of WONDER -- awe,
transcendence, beauty, expansion and bliss) *seeks* to describe an essential
experiential part of human consciousness that can't really be put into words.
Religion is a language (like poetry) that opens up that discussion.
> When your brain comes up
> with something out of left field, the only derivation for which would be
> some kind of neural trace showing neuron firings in painful detail, from
> some distant past up to now, well, just forget the explanation. Just think,
> instead, "aha!". A bolt from the blue; it's really a bolt from the grey.
That is really not the issue. Where inspiration comes from is really moot.
What is useful is to accept what *is*. It is not realistic to deny that
god(s) (though clearly not a reality) exert real influence you. Even if that
influence is unwitting. It does not require your knowledge of god's existence
(or your knowledge of it's nonexistence) to make this true. Since it is a
construct, an idea, it certainly does not require any of the *gods' * to be
real in order for it to make changes and resonances on the physical plane.
As I said, those ideas - based on symbolic fiction - became real events and
actions.
If that god was a crude "idea of what cannot be comprehended", crude events
and actions followed. If it was a refined one, then more aesthetics and
refined emotions are involved.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:38:23 MDT