What is your purpose?

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But her parents would be if they told her that Santa Claus existed, or even that they believed in Santa Claus, ( unless they actually did, that is ).

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I can relate to what you are saying. When I was young and inquisitive I attended several different Christian churches looking for "answers"; but what I noticed was that there really were no "answers" or "deep truths" on offer so much as a sense of belonging and community. This was most openly expressed in an evangelical born again type church I went to with a friend. Lots of arm waving and jolly singing and happy smiling people. The atmosphere was quite hypnotic. I knew I could let go of my "search" and "logic" and just become engulfed in all the emotion but inside I knew it wasn't for me, not what I was looking for. While I could have become a Christian and had the warm fuzzy feeling inside of a God caring for me "loving arms etc" I knew I would be lying to myself.

Over the years I have found answers and more importantly discovered more about questions themselves. My own search for "agency, cause and meaning" is more or less complete, but is so far from what Christians would call "God" that I can't even begin to describe it. Words completely fail. I could toss in references to Consciousness, Nirvana, no-time and obtuse mathematical principles but unless the recipient of those words knew what the hell I was talking about the words / labels would convey nothing. So I don't usually bother. Easier to say I'm atheist / Zen Buddhist.

Thanks for your reply.

I don't think that you do. At least I don't relate at all to the example of something you see as similar.

This is totally alien to me, in the context of belief in god. The only time I felt something like this was on a Large Group Awareness Training, "More to Life", a Cognitive Therapy based course I went on a few times. And I agree that it can be, and in fact was, very hypnotic, for a while.

But that is not what I feel as a result of believing in god. So it is probably that, like you about your zen buddhist experience, I am simply not able to express it very well, which is why I also do not generally tend to try and describe my feelings etc, but stick instead to the bare bones of it.

Apart from the first rush of feeling, which was astonishingly powerful/moving, I have tended to find it a remarkably unemotional experience. Like a belief in justice, truth, or free will.


Yes, I felt like that when I was in my teens and went for a while to a christian group called "Crusaders", and they were so "happy" and smiley etc, and I "tried" to join in, to believe, but realised very quickly that I would have been only pretending.

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Interesting. Words tend to fail us when trying to convey certain experiences or aspects of knowledge. Many years ago when my own spiritual experiences / spiritual knowledge started to drop into place I noticed others would often use the same inappropriate words and poor labels. It seemed apparent that they knew what I knew and since we both used the same futile words to convey this knowledge that we knew we were actually talking about the same thing!

What is difficult to convey regarding my own spiritual awareness is that it is not some distant abstract mental concept or a belief system but is here and present around me all the time. The world has not changed, but my perception of it has. My perception of me, life, death and everything has changed.

That's it.

Not everything, yet, perhaps because it's only been 18 months, but I have noticed that it is slowly permeating everything, like water spreading/entering, sometimes dramatically, other times smoothly. It is having a sort of domino effect on other things.
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Last edited by ouinon on 12 May 2009, 2:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

In other words, you are saying that a lie is totally dependent upon motivation and something that is overwhelmingly accepted as untrue is not a lie.

That is not what I am saying.

As I said in reply to your earlier question, a lie is "when you tell someone something that you do not yourself believe, ( generally with the intention to deceive )". That is not a question of motivation, but of belief. Do you believe what you are saying to a person? If you do then it is not a lie.

And just because a lot of people do not believe the same thing does not make it a lie. Imagine if that were the case.

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And what I said was that you believe that if somebody is trying to deceive, that defines a lie whether their method is an untruth or otherwise.

Im all for honesty

I pride myself on my own personal brand of honesty but one thing I have learned the hard way is that not everyone is prepared to accept honesty, especially when it conveys an unpleasant message. Something we must be prepared to awknowlege is that what we think, what we believe to be absolutely true beyond reason, is not always shared. When this is the case it is always better to express oneself and move on rather than insist that others follow our lead in a likeminded fashion. We must realize that what is right, or what is true can only be determined by our own individual perceptions and that these differ greatly from person to person.

I'm going to be presumptuous & say that I think when Sand asked 'is there such a thing as a lie?', the word 'lie' of course having strong connotations of deliberately deceiving someone, he perhaps ought to have more accurately phrased his meaning 'is there such a thing as an untrue statement?'

& even if he didn't mean that, I think it's a more pertinent question.

In other words, given that you think

do you think it is possible to say something that is not true?

1 + 1 = 3

That seems pretty untrue to me! But if someone said they felt 1 + 1 = 3 worked for them, would ouinon say that means it is true?

In some mathematics 1+1 = 10

Math is very flexible and when you are counting clouds or holes, 1+1=1

I could probably discover some system where 1+1=3 (Perhaps a family with 1 child)

That's a pretty good example of how belief works, because language is even more flexible than maths. "Truth" in language is subjective; it depends on how people are using the symbols, aswell as on the kind of data being manipulated.

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No. That is not a good example of how belief works. 1 + 1 = 10 only if we use the figure '10' to mean '2'. It doesn't mean that if you count your apples, discover that you have only 2, but then decide to write '2' as '10', that you now have 5 times as many apples.

Truth doesn't depend on how we use symbols, only our understanding of truth depends on it.

I'll try another rephrasing of the question: do you think it is ever possible for anyone to be wrong about anything?

"Truth" is a symbol. It is not something "real", ( except in so far as language/symbols are part of human reality ). It depends completely on how we use symbols, because it is one itself.


What do you mean by "wrong"? In the cosmic scheme of things nothing is "wrong".

... I actually believe that at some level, if ever so faintly.

I know what you mean, but your question is so loaded, being phrased so absolutely, as if "the map were the same thing as the territory".

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