or how about not cluttering the mind with belief and freely exploring what is reality without constraints other than the curiousity of what may be.

Or how about nobody posted in this section of Gaudiya_repercussions and so I just couldn't let this room go unoccupied.

QUOTE

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

R. Buckminster Fuller

"Krishnamurti"

Thanks for starting this area up Babu.

I struggle with the concept of belief quite often. The struggle involves making a distinction between the internal beliefs that have come from personal realizations as opposed to those given or thrust upon me from authorities (priests, gurus, teachers, parents) throughout my life.

The beliefs that have come via personal realizations are of value to me, giving me inspiration to further explore spirituality that allows the heart to grow and giving hope in the face of the discord and strife (illness, death in the family, losing your job, having G.W. Bush re-elected, etc. ) that eventually comes along in life.

Unrealized beliefs become problematic when they are held too rigidly by individuals. This rigidity creates the air of absolute certainty in individuals and groups, which is then aired out in public as fundamentalist attitudes with total disdain for any point of view or thought that may be different. These kind of beliefs give the true believers who hold them the illusion of a position of privilege, a place where they alone rule the earth with the absolute truth. The world becomes black and white, those who disagree with the absolute truth are then deemed ‘OTHER’ or as we in KC remember, ‘Karmi’s’. Meaningful and honest discussions are obliterated by the act of ‘Preaching’ at somebody with the goal of conversion to the true and right side. Taken to the extreme, this type of belief becomes fanaticism. So this type of belief I can do without and fight against, especially when in comes up in Vaisnavism.

So I think there is a big difference in self-realized beliefs that confirm faith as opposed to the unrealized beliefs that can become in the wrong minds, faith killers.

As long as spirituality remains on the platform of belief, the whole thing is very shaky. As soon as one has some experiences, there is no more belief required, belief is replaced by conviction. Once I asked someone if he believes in God or not. He said with a smile, "No, I don't believe in God. I know that God exists, I have my relationship with God."

Of course, an initial faith is needed so that one starts to practice, but when after decades of practice the only thing we have is belief, there might be some problems. Experiences are like signals on the road that ensure us we are heading for the right direction.

The other tricky thing about faith is the attitude we all know, "My faith is superior than yours, my God is a nicer God than your God. My God is the best God." This concept leads to fights on smaller and larger scales. In less dangerous cases one remains on the platform of imagining oneself superior to others and stops at that point. However, sometimes people go further: "My faith is superior than yours, so I have the right to impose it on you, I have the right to tell you what to do." This is the beginning of religious fanaticism that is one of the most effective means to produce people who - getting disgusted of "holy men" killing (verbally or phisically) each other in the name of "holy principles" - turn to atheism and nihilism.

On another forum a person maintaining a webpage dedicated to atheism wrote an essay on why he is grateful to those extremely fanatical new-born Christians who often appear on forums and present their brilliant arguments beaming with wisdom and logic: "Jesus is the only way." He happily said that if it wasn't for these "preachers", there would be a lot less atheists in the world today.

Caranaravinda, "faith" and "belief" do have a feel of being the same thing so how one defines these terms is relevant. Being who Bucky Fuller was and his distinction between the two, "faith" is that of being active in one's understanding, processing and communion with it all. Faith is very much alive as compared to belief which is very much stagnant. That was an excellent quote. Thank you.

Madhavadasa, Krishnamurti, I raise my cup.

Kalisurfer, excellent post. And to continue from where I left off at Caranaravinda's, the struggle you talk about is very much that we are not the same person from our yesterday's or even a few moments ago experience and so these personal realizations can be in a way, not our own anymore and something that we are borrowing to make up a belief system that is really not about where we are in our relationship and living with all that is and so even one's personal realizations can deaden or bring about a stagnation if one doesn't see them as a stepping stone on a journey.

I find the big mistake of understanding what are religious teachings is the making of them into belief systems when they are more about, at least the best of them imo, are about breaking the conditioning process of the mind so as one can be a heart centered being and therefore alive, awake. The mythology and stories of these traditions have a quality of a high poetics and not facts and to take them literally is to not enter into the cosmic drama of it all. It goes without saying that most of us here percieve that those who get wrapped up in the preverted "law" and "authority" understanding that arise from literal understandings are as walking corpses and yet we can feel within their hearts a young boy and a young girl yearning to be heard.

So the twist to your post, even a personal realization can become an unrealized belief when it is no longer tangible to one's process. More important than one's realizations is the process, which may not be a process in terms that can be called a process, that process that brings about personal realizations and one knows and feels so very deeply, "I am alive."

Openmind, yes, one's faith must be active and current. One's faith is only as good as the last time you looked into the eye's of another and felt the love beam back and forth, felt joy brimming from your heart as you sat by a stream and watched those rivulets of water pass on their way to the Ocean or to watch a cat kicking and playing with its ball as it seemingly assumes the ball has a mind of its own. This is not an assumption though, the ball does have a mind of its own.

Maybe religions should have a Best Before End date.


A Golden Thought!!! [now, where is that flower smilie? ]

And yet, for every myth there exists an early epoch when it may be taken literally without the believer becoming out of touch with the flow of life.

It's those who come centuries later, those who know the skies aren't populated by dragons and the earth doesn't rest on four giant elephants... it's their clinging to the words, their refusal to use their powers of mind and heart in relating to the world, that plays the devil.

...I think.

"or how about not cluttering the mind with belief and freely exploring what is reality without constraints other than the curiousity of what may be."

Yes, but there is an order in the Universe, which some people call God. I don´t find it reasonable that there isn´t a force that ties everything together and maintains it. I don´t know if I am clear, my English is not so well. There are a lot of things that we can not see or hear but still exist. I find it a bit limited to explore the external reality freely and not feeling what is beyond at all.

Some persons can actually see and feel the presence of the Divine everywhere. It is not a belief, it is the absolute reality, as opposed to the relative reality which is temporarily manifested.

Yes, there is a kind of power/energy that is present everywhere, it can be experienced by anyone. However, people approach this energy in different ways, some give it a name, some don't, some try to see it as a person, some don't, etc. This is just fine. The problem begins when someone says, "My approach to this presence is better/more sublime than yours." Just like when we see people debating over which rasa is the "best"... Both parties quote their holy texts and in the end they get nowhere.

Yes, there may be all this God or order or whatever we may call it but it may as well not exist if one has no actualization of it. The actualization and relationship of The All expressed through the self, does that need a mindset, a faith, a belief system for that to be as it appears all these thing block the manifestation of The All within the self. When one is awake, does one need all these theories about what sleep is and what it is when one is no longer asleep and gets out of bed?

It would then be alive and not a belief.

How about developing what I refer to as a 'dual belief system'? I was brought up with all these stories and "myths" and I have tended to develop an understanding that "those sorts of things do not happen these days".

I have no problem listening to such stories and accepting that they may indeed have actually happened, yet accepting current thoughts and beliefs as valid too. A 'dual belief system' that has afforded me no real problems in life.

I think the danger occurs when there is a crossover between the two. When I was younger and more idealistic, a religious friend of mine decided to do some free thinking and wondered about the prehistoric existence of dinosaurs, stating that they cannot be denied due to the discoveries of their skeletons. I mused that such skeletons were the skeletons of the demons killed by divinities in previous yugas.

A Jewish friend of mine once told me that his rabbi had told him the bones of dinosaurs had been placed there by god when the earth was created and thus they do not disprove the Biblical account of creation.

You have formulated a real challenge, Brainiac. By "dual belief system" do you mean accepting both that those things, let's call them "mythical", have indeed happened and have indeed been quite true as facts, and that the reality surrounding you today presents a different set of facts?

The boundary between belief systems would then be one of time.

Your post made me think of another way of resolving this. Unfortunately I only have secondary sources, namely a mention of a Sankarite philosopher Sriharsa (ZrIharSa) in a book by Bharati Agehananda. Hardly a dispassionate and scholarly presentation, nevertheless the insights he attributes to Sriharsa make sense.

"It was Sriharsa indeed, as well as some more recent Hindu thinkers, who devised what I would call an interior critique -- a critical attitude which does not idsqualify its holder from being orthodox. Among the Buddhists, such has been the attitude of one of their greatest teachers, Nagarjuna. With them, this attitude fortunately became the normal. Not so with the Hindus: Sriharsa and the later thinkers were exceptions and are not really accepted as exemplars in Hindu scholasticism. [...]

Here is a set of canonical doctrines, which cannot be impugned without forfeiting Hinduhood. But they can be freely interpreted. And if interpretation does not suffice to make a doctrine discursively acceptable or at least plausible, then let us regard this doctrine as appertaining only to the innermost world of yoga, of meditation, and as having no bearing on our natural world. [...] I accept the doctrine non-discursively, as having a purely private, incommunicable validity. But I do not assign discursive validity to it." (The Ochre Robe, by Bharati Agehananda)

In this quote, the boundary between the two belief systems is drawn between the "outer" world as perceived by the senses, and the inner world of meditation and divine vision.

Everybody in America knows this. God wanted us to have gasoline, therefore he made dinosaurs and later killed them to ferment into petrol.

Indeed. Agehananda evidently had little problem adapating to whatever world was most interesting at the moment . Or so his reputation goes...

Yes exactly. I have always had the understanding that such events happened in the "old times" and rarely happen these days if not at all. These events may have fitted under the logic and socilogy of those times and the peope of that time would have had no problem accepting it too. Now that we have come a long way, the rules have changed and we need to evaluate the past, but that doesn't mean we have to discard everything. Thus, the development of a dual-belief system may help. I have practical experience of this now that I have gone back to university to study psychology. I am often faced with problems that can be easily explained away as karma and whatnot, but I have to be aware that my peers and lecturers are not just unfamiliar with such ideas but may also be scornful.

It can be a struggle at times but mostly it is just 'innovative' vis-a-vis the dinosaur example I gave earlier. I find that keeping a dual-belief system allows one to keep one's faith in such metaphysical realities while living and working in today's largely unbelieving world.


I was just about to bring that point up. Let's just say for a minute that there are some perfected gurus in Vrndavana (like, say, Madrasi Baba) who have achieved perfection and can see Radha-Krsna at every moment. This is great for them, but the rest of us cannot see. Who is deluded here? These souls are walking around in another world while simultaneously being present here.

This is a contemporary scenario, but what if the events of the past were similarly inaccessible to the public at large? Take the example of Krishna's showing the Visvarupa to Arjuna; no one else at Kurukshetra could see it except Arjuna who had apparently been granted divine vision. So what if all those 'myths' happened and yet did not happen? What if, even in those days, spiritual experience was limited to those who had the vision to see them?

If I did not have God revealed to me by way of the vedas, Acaryas, masters & what-have-yous I would admire the next best thing in my mind to God...& that is music. I have oftn felt, as a musician, while engaged in playing, it is not me who is playing the music, but the music is playing me in order to manifest. I tend to look at individual songs and or meldies to be living entities & the musician is a channel, a medium by which the music can descend down to our level to try and aspire us to transcend up to its level.

I have had experiences while playing where my friend I I would be improving and we would play the sme thing...like we both could feel how the song goes and we both would channel it thru. ...in syncnicities

"Dual belief system" (or even more than dual...) - for me, it sounds a bit like doublethink from 1984, but the fault may be in me. I'm a materialist at heart.

(Srijiva)

A Golden Thought! (showers of flowers)

Maybe we should start a thread about it sometime -- the Divine Music...

I don't think it has to result in doublethink. It may be that Brainiac simply recognizes the need to apply two different sets of validity standards when dealing with bodies of knowledge belonging to two different epochs with their different mental frames.

It would be hard for myself to do, too, because my mind firmly belongs here and now. That's after all why I had to give up my KC belief.) But people raised in two cultures, or at the boundary of cultures, may have that ability. It could be like speaking two languages, English for business and French for love...

Sounds like you have been inspired by Cioran. Have you read any of his works?

That's a loaded word.

That's a whole loaded sentence...

I think it is fairly well established that 'blind faith' and 'fanatical faith' are rather disturbing at best. What I don't feel has been adequately considered here is the concept of 'seeing faith' or 'inspired faith'. Faith is reality and there are different qualities and types of faith. Krsna outlines these in Bhagavad-Gita.

Gaudiya Acharyas have described faith as the halo of Srimati Radharani - so, at least within the context of GV faith holds the highest position. But what does that faith feel like? How will it manifest in the world? And what will the difference between this illuminating faith and the fanatical faith be? I think this is a good starting point to continue to explore faith.

I will posit this here - we should strive to become free of 'blind faith' or 'fanatical faith' and at the same time we should also strive to cultivate divine faith.

Toward the end of his life Sridhara Maharaja had a dream that he described this way, "I dreamed that all my knowledge melted away and all that I was left with was my faith".

I have the experience that when I first read Bhagavad-Gita I couldn't intellectualize it or understand it due to the foreign nomenclature and concepts presented therein (foreign to me at the time that is). However I also had the very real experience of 'feeling' that this book was very special and unique. I 'felt' that from the moment I saw it in a pile of books. Over time I have found that many things in scripture strike my heart cords and resonate within me very deeply. I know that the same passages will have quite different effects on others, but I can't deny the tangible reality of how they affect me.

Nor can anyone deny it is a real experience you have. This kind of faith, I think, is so very different from the faith "by effort of will and threat of hell" that I have so often tried to practice. It was a burden to bear, that faith, and it could collapse at any time. While what we have had a profound realization of, we will not fear losing.

Still, as you say yourself, Audarya-lila, what is a very real experience to you will not be real for everyone else. You can try to share it, you can try to induce people to open up their hearts and search for the same experience there. But nothing more than that.

To use a formulation of Bharati Agehananda again, "Mystical experience does not confer the status of objective existence on what has been experienced."

I may experience X and X may be objectively existing. But it may also not, and the only thing existing may be my subjective experience.

Ultimately, I believe that even for a self-realized mystic there is no escaping the realization that although his experience is so compelling, it may still not correspond to an objectively existing reality. At least not literally so. Yet the mystic will choose to follow it, regardless the risk.

In Gaudiya I understand that the sounds are supposed to literally be God. So the music is actually God. And when you sing it the song is Krishna Himself with zero metaphor; the songs are not words or tones representing or talking about Krishna, but they -are- Krishna. In keertan, having Krishna physically 'dancing on your tongue,' Krishna being the very sound the tongue is making...

That is my impression from what I hear and I think it's great. Like W. Carlos Williams' "No Idea But In Things," where an incantation isn't a symbol to stand for something behind that incantation, but the the meaning of the incantation is the actual uttering of it in itself.
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Dhyana, you've hit the nail on the head.

I love it when someone says to me, when you experience it you know.

I have experienced mystical perceptions but as Dhyana says, who knows what that really was objectively? All I know is what my subjective experience is, and while it causes me to believe certain things, I must be intellectually honest and admit my interpretation could be wrong. I can't cite it as proof of anything.

Tapati, you can and you could start your own religion.

Hey! That's probably how religions started, with guys proclaiming that 'their' vision and interpretation of God was the 'best'.

I think you are right about how religions started (and I have been planning a topic about just that--how did they start? religious tolerance.org has a page regarding someone's theories about the origin of religions).

However, without objective proof of my way of looking at things and my interpretation of these mystical perceptions, I am not going to ask others to believe in them.

Nor do I have any desire to be a leader in that sense. I just want to be a catalyst for others to take charge of their religious experience and belief.

I just wanted to thank everyone who has posted in this topic.

I do not feel I could have verbalized my thoughts any better than what has been said here.

I agree with Tapati that she is a catalyst for others to take charge of their religious experience. I have certainly been challenged to reflect on my beliefs.

After a bit more reflection, I will probably have a post ready. It has been a long time since I have reflected on my religious upbringing and what it means to me today.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, Brainiac. Historically, religions usually start as small groups of people gathered around a charismatic person, a mystic or inspired teacher, who has a profound realization or experience to share, who is possessed by it.

He may not think that his vision is the "best", but he can be burning for his calling, feeling it's something of utmost importance and a real solution.

Dedication and self-confidence are attractive. The man who has confidence in himself, or his discovery, gains the confidence of others.

I speculate that some of these mystics never become founders of religions because they have the attitude of critical distance to their own experience, so well exemplified by Tapati --



And some don't found religions because their mystical experience does not correspond to a social need, so they won't find enough followers.

But perhaps from time to time, even a self-doubting mystic will become a leader for a movement out of a sense of obligation to the followers. He may even teach them to be critical of himself! Buddha comes to mind. Then it may take many generations before the uncritical, deifying following becomes common.

You know, when you think about it then it actually becomes quite amazing to contemplate exactly how many saints out there never actually founded the religions or sects that grew around them and their influence, with the exception of Muhummad and probably Moses. One of the most recent religions - Sikhism - reveres the Ten Gurus beginning with Guru Nanak, who spent much of his life in blissful singsong and travelling preaching, as well as sparking off a mini-revolution in a social context. One Sikh friend told me that he considered Guru Gobind Singh (the tenth Guru) to be the 'real' founder of Sikhism since it was he who instituted most of the rules and practices that make up present-day Sikhism.

Caitanya comes to my mind, and the fact that he didn't wrote anything except Siksastaka.

Yes, but folks have been able to make a few religions out of his being such a good listener.

I thought he empowered Rupa and Sanatana and kind of wrote all those books though them.

I think though she should inform folks what that "special ingredient" is in the prasadam before they eat.

And what is it?

http://www.gaudiya-repercussions.com/index...findpost&p=1297

"WOMEN PUT THEIR VAGINAL JUICES INTO FOOD THEY COOK IN ORDER TO ENSNARE MEN TO THEIR WILL."

Well, if I've started a religion, they are cooking for me--no?

Then do you hunger to eat the food you have inspired folks to create?

Just a note to say that even though this forum only has one topic so far, I am leaving it deliberately as a placeholder to let atheists and agnostics know that they are just as welcome to this forum as anyone else here.

I am not an atheist. That is a religion unto itself.

An agnostic is just a person who is truthful. No one knows anything about spiritual matters. An agnostic just admits it.

Here is a cool analogy about faith that I am paraphrasing from a book I recently read by Buddhist author Sharon Salzberg, called “Faith, Trusting Your Own Deepest Experiences.”

The analogy describes what happens when we allow fixed beliefs to create our reality for us. Buddhists say that holding such views is like gazing at the sky through a straw.

The sky is considered the unobstructed truth of who we are and what our lives are all about.

When a belief system that is unrealized and handed down to us is used to look at this sky, it is the same as if looking at the truth (sky) through a very narrow tube, allowing us to only see a very small part of the sky while being convinced that we are seeing the whole of it.

When we are attached to our beliefs, we can spend a lot of time comparing straws: “I’ve got a better straw than you, it is saffron and has the clay of the Ganges on it” or “Mine has a gold cross on it with clay from the Jordan River on it”. If we are afraid on top of this, then this fear makes us hold on to the straw with all our might.

Holding on tight to our straw makes one rigid, ready to chastise all others for believing all the wrong things without really listening to what they are saying. The tight straw holders become defensive and resist opening the mind to new ideas and viewpoints.

Confronted by the vastness of the sky, not knowing how to understand its massive proportions, the tight straw holders seek refuge in their one special straw.

Perhaps it is only when we have the courage to put down the straw and view the sky as it is, vast and immeasurable, then and only then can we recognize the varied perspectives each straw gives us.

We may then be able to see the difference each straw gives us, the difference between our favorite straw, our usual everyday straw, our comfort straw, our parents straw, our cultures straw, and the actual sky itself.

If we hold the straw skillfully, we will be able to put it down sometimes and look directly at the sky. If we hold beliefs skillfully, we will not get entangled in them, but will see them as the constructions of our mind that they are.

When we claim our individual right to question everything, including our own beliefs, perhaps it is then that we can leave our dependence on what is familiar and let in heartfelt, realized, open, qualities of faith.

As Alan Watts used to say, “Belief clings, faith lets go.”

Faith is just as destructive as belief. Both are the result of being brainwashed by a filthy iskcon guru. Or any authority who is so anxious to bring you into the fold. Buyer beware.

Love,

AUTHORITY

Your statement is a belief based on your faith that people have been brainwashed by Gurus whom you consider filthy. So would not this faith in your own belief be destructive, if your original statement were true?

My statement is not a belief but it is based on an understanding of thinking and how thinking produces belief.

You can believe in so much but still remain confused and wanting.

Love,

AUTHORITY