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General Interest > Philosophy, Sociology & Psychology
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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

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skepticism
    #7084235 -

"...skepticism appears to be the ideal spiritual perspective. Skepticism clears away cumbersome beliefs on an intellectual level, just as meditation (ideally) clears away beliefs, emotions and thoughts on a more experiential level. Skepticism can help us achieve mystical deautomatization, or so i wanted to believe.

My handling of real rather than metaphorical garbage gradually gave me a more complicated view of the matter. In my kitchen, we put garbage in bags that come in boxes of twenty. After i yank the last bag from its box, the box becomes trash, which i put in the bag...

Everytime i pulled the last bag from the box and stuffed the box in the bag, i intuited a paradox lurking within this ritual.

Eventually i solved the riddle: every garbage removal system generates garbage. I began looking askance at skepticism.

Maybe skepticism, instead of cleansing our vision, just substitutes one type of trash for another. Instead of belief in reincarnation, angels, ESP, E.T, parallel universes and the oedipus complex, the skeptic crams his mind with disbelief in reincarnation, angels, and so on.

The problem is that any truth or anti-truth, no matter how initially revelatory, sooner or later turns into garbage that occludes our vision of the living world..."


however...

"doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one"
-John Horgan


--------------------


Everything I post is fiction.

Edited by Moonshoe (06/23/07 04:53 PM)

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Re: skepticism [Re: Moonshoe]
    #7084257 -

John Horgan is a maker of ridiculous quotes.


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Re: skepticism [Re: Moonshoe]
    #7084276 -

Interesting thread.

What about, for example, meditation? I think one must have a kind of faith that meditation is a fundamentally beneficial practice in order to do it. If you bring too much doubt into meditation, if you go in with the mindset, "I do not think I will attain a higher degree of awareness through meditation" or "It will be hard for me to be convinced of the merit of meditation", you probably will not find it particularly rewarding.

Skepticism is good practice not when it ridicules your subjective experiences, but when it seeks to analyze them in as many lights as possible. When you have several competing analyses, you amalgamate them to a degree and give primacy to a few conceptual models, which is fine unless the models become stale and when new subjective experiences are force-fed into the old models.

Sometimes I want to be more skeptical than I am because it would give me a nice cushy protective barrier from things like psychedelic experiences, synchronicity, and other abnormal phenomena and modes of consciousness.

We can be fairly certain that certainty is ridiculous. I don't know how to phrase what I want to say, but I think that learning to observe and appraise your experiences as scientifically as possible, while remaining loving and open-minded, is the most beneficial way to live, as opposed to hard-nosed skepticism or living life lost in the realm of fancy.


--------------------
“Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all, for whenever I will—
and I will have the will, strengthened
as I’ll be with contemplation and study—
at the crucial moments I’ll recover
my spirit as was before: ascetic.”

Edited by Lion (06/23/07 05:35 PM)

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Re: skepticism [Re: Lion]
    #7084484 -

I agree :thumbup:

Skepticism should be wielded as a powerful tool to break or at the very least loosen the bonds of attachment to ideas, concepts, thoughts, views, values, etc. In the mind's search for solidity, it seems like the natural tendency to attach to the opposite ideas, concepts, thoughts, views, values, etc., but this is a mistake. That is merely replacing one chain with another.

Believing and not-believing are both attachments that should be examined skeptically and objectively.


--------------------
"What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?"

"Belief is a beautiful armor
But makes for the heaviest sword"
- John Mayer

Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin.

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln

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Unfolding Nature Shop: Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

General Interest > Philosophy, Sociology & Psychology
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