Get real: give up religious and mystical concepts
Religious believers who have a pilgrimage to this blog often amuse me. They'll say, "Brian, you live in your head; you need to give up your concepts about being as well as embrace God's truth."
Ha ha ha. What a joke. These guys as well as gals have been deluded. They've got things completely backward.
I usually rode my Burgman 650 maxi-scooter to a coffeehouse in downtown Salem. It's 45 degrees here in Oregon. you was cold, yet absolutely not freezing, interjection to warm gloves/gear as well as a large cozy windscreen.
I didn't consider about anything abnormal once upon my twenty-five notation drive. Here as well as right away being was all you needed, or wanted.
So tell me, ostensible concept-giver-up'ers, how often do you have thoughts about your God, divine ideal, soul, devout essence, heaven, paradise, other-worldly ultimate reality, or whatever else you hold in?
Much some-more often than you do, for sure, because I've roughly entirely since up ponderings about imaginary things which have been conceived as existing somewhere beyond a physical. Thus you win a Concept Game, if points have been scored by living as tighten as probable to careless reality.
In my last post about "Philosophy in a Flesh" you said which I'd share how a final chapter in this book speaks about religiosity as well as spirituality. Well, you already have -- in my own words.
But here's how George Lakoff as well as Mark Johnson put it.
Your physique is not, as well as could not be, a small vessel for a discarnate mind. THe judgment of a thoughts separate from a physique is a metaphorical concept... In short, a very judgment of a discarnate thoughts arises from embodied experiences which each a single of us has throughout a life.
Consider: each holy book, each holy person, each holy vision -- these all have been partial of someone's corporeal awareness. This isn't a conjecture. It's a neurological fact. Show ! me a sin gle tellurian being who has ever had an knowledge but a earthy body.
You can't. Because it has never happened. Being tellurian means being embodied.
Why, then, is it so easy for people to hold which they are, or have, a discarnate hint or spirit? This gets us into a roots of eremite belief, a large theme which you don't have time or inclination to address here (my coffee cup is already half empty, as well as my writing is fueled by caffeine).
I'll simply share a cogent regard by Lakoff as well as Johnson that's related to a basic actuality about a brain.
The corporeal organ which creates it probable for us to be aware, isn't capable of being but delay perceived. This is because neurosurgery can achieved but anesthesia. Such creates sense, of course, from an evolutionary standpoint. If a perceptions of outdoor being were churned up with perceptions of a brain's perceiving, things would get genuine confusing, genuine fast.
In virtually all of a acts of perception, a corporeal organs of notice (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin) have been not what you have been in attendance to. For example, when you walk down a travel as well as demeanour during a house, you have been routinely not in attendance to a eyes, most reduction to a visible complement of a brains.
The actuality which what you attend to is rarely what you understand with gives a illusion which mental acts occur exclusively of a neglected body. In summary, you all have a embellishment complement which conceptualizes a minds as disembodied.
This can't be helped. It's usually a way which we've developed to knowledge a world.
However, us Homo sapiens have been capable of minimizing a illusion of disembodiment. We don't have to supplement to this conceptualizing by imagining a abnormal area which is separate as well as graphic from earthly existence.
Doing which serve distances us from reality. Now we've come to not usually perspective ourselves as somehow di! vorced f rom a earthy world, we've also embraced a judgment of an entirely other universe to which you aspire.
Again: "God," "soul," "spirit," "heaven," "paradise," as well as so upon have been concepts.
More: insofar as these notions have been viewed in a abnormal sense, they have been conceptualizations which don't describe to anything genuine -- since each tellurian knowledge is embodied.
Lakoff as well as Johnson do not dismiss spirituality entirely, though. It is probable to live in this universe as well as be of it.
The environment is not an "other" to us. It is not a collection of things which you encounter. Rather, it is partial of a being. It is a area of a existence as well as identity. We cannot as well as do not exist detached from it.
...An embodied spirituality requires an cultured attitude toward a universe which is central to self-nurturance, to a nurturance of others, as well as to a nurturance of a universe itself.
Embodied spirituality requires an bargain which inlet is not unfeeling as well as reduction than human, yet animated as well as some-more than human.
It requires pleasure, happiness in a corporeal connection with earth as well as air, sea as well as sky, plants as well as animals -- as well as a recognition which they have been all some-more than human, some-more than any tellurian beings could ever achieve.
Embodied spirituality is some-more than devout experience. It is an ethical attribute to a earthy world.
