Yay!! So nice to talk to someone [who listens *cough* male mutual firend *cough*] about all these intricacies in life. It’s hard though, the brick wall is unavoidable. At the end of the day at least half of the reasons I believe what I believe is because this particular illusion pushes the right psychological buttons and puts me at ease. I know that most of my life/childhood has been spent wanting things to be true more than actually evaluating their validity. But this was the mind blowing year that jarred loose many of the repressions designed by my self-preserving developing mind. The book helped me situate my angst ridden and freed intellect in what I believe to me a more accurate representation of Truth. That being that the symbolic world, the human agenda, and all the things we feel but can’t touch are in fact self-created. Still they are real because they are real to us. They are in some way the terms of the contract that binds us to our bodies in exchange for windows into the world. We are not floating souls and our urge to propel forward and our thirst for knowledge is beyond our control. I do believe though, as the book insinuates, that knowledge in it of itself is a pursuit, a distraction, a means of denying mortality the same way a child automatically fabricates himself in the belief systems imposed on him. The mind wants to feel stable, the mind wants to believe, and so it grounds itself in illusions that become a reality to it- to me. I guess I’m saying I believe my thoughts are just a bodily function to sustain my bodily needs which has come to include intellectual sustenance for the evolved human being. I suppose that does make faith a gap-filler, it makes pretty much everything a gap-filler, and I suppose that’s how I see life; a gap between birth and death. Still I look at myself from afar in a way, and see that I am week animal confined to my impulses, yet unlike other animals I face the torment of knowing that. I face the torment of knowing that my agenda is the whole world and at the same time an utter insignificance. I am everything in my internal world, my intellectually perceiving self sustaining real world, and next to nothing in my almost brush with objectivity. So when it comes to faith, I believe in the possibility of patterns existing above my comprehension- I believe in that possibility whole heartedly. At the same time I know psychologically why I believe it- why I choose to believe it- what solidity it gives me in waking life- and while I think that existing as a belief is not the same as existing, I don’t think that it can be called false or none- existent...
Does that help clarify my beliefs or did I miss the point, I kind of ran away with my thoughts. Anyway I kind of want to be proven wrong just because this world view leaves me so unbelievably jaded sometimes.
P.S. Schools over- will reflect on that later