Something larger than us does rule our lives

Post Reply New Topic

I think this might be a better way to broach the issue of belief and why people believe. I'm thinking of this in light of a recent necro that just popped up here but I'd rather go in a new direction with a new OP than try to chain onto that.

I remember in Bill Maher's Religulous that he admitted, even at times where he had no belief, that he had the instinctual compulsion to talk to deity and ask It for help in times of need. His example might have been quitting smoking or something along those lines?

For as extraordinary as this claim might sound I'll say that we know that something larger than us runs our lives and it very much does feel like something of a guardian angel (or devil - all depending) brooding over us. From one direction you have modern neuroscience suggesting that our actions are the culminations of internal processes that culminate significantly earlier than our actions come out of us. Similarly the idea of intuition, ie. just knowing you know something even though the facts aren't all in yet, seems to very often have a significant grain of truth to it - it may not deal with the whole truth of a situation but it can definitely scream loudly at a valid piece or part. To think we have a part of our brains that micromanage our musculature, our movement, the secretion of brain chemicals, we clearly have a supercomputer on board just that quite often we don't necessarily have access to do what we please with it - at least unless you're lucky enough to be either a born savant of some type or be lucky enough to have the right kind of rare head-trauma that adds to your capabilities rather than subtracting.

Whether you individually believe or don't believe there's something past the human subconscious working within us I think the point still holds - that a lot of people can have a particular innate sense of wonder turn toward theism as they sense this greater part of themselves, it's tendency to flirt with us through symbol and synchronicity, and if it really wants us to pay attention to it those synchronicities will speak loudly to us. I mean consider for a moment that your direction of attention is decided before you actually move your thoughts or focus in a particular direction and add the consideration that the very aspect of your being that's always two steps ahead of you really wants to lead or guide you in a particular direction - manipulation of your own selective attention would be one of it's best tools.

This is part of why I think that panentheistic monism and outlooks of the like aren't just barren philosophies brought up for argumentative sake - people often feel something along this line nudging them first and evaluate the philosophic contents later. I'm not at all denying the possibility as well for something of an Atman or Adam Kadmon that we all branches of, in fact a large part of my own explorations of consciousness are about trying to get down to the bottom of my own subconscious to see what I can find there - ie. does it lead to increasingly gross and mechanical forms such as it would if that was all there was or does it lead out to something like Raphael in the tarot trump of The Lovers? It just seems to me like this will look very similar either way - whether it's something like St. John of the Cross's Holy Guardian Angel flirting with us or whether it's just a very well-informed cerebellum or brain stem.

This is a large part of why I don't think religion and various forms of mysticism would go away any time soon. These are ways in which people try to organize that relationship with more interior parts of themselves. It's not that all of these ways are necessarily constructive but I think you'll always have a sizable amount of the populace very interested in this side of their existence and most likely it would be the people who find that particular inner giant most communicative.

Thoughts?

Once stood in the bathroom and realized something. I exist. We exist. Everything exists, and if laws of physics are ultimately based upon the interaction of matter as a physical force - it cannot be doing so in isolation.

I have always believed in a higher power.

I've often marveled at this very thing. We exist and are aware of ourselves. How very strange that is...

This, exactly.
I feel like we're God's children, simply because we're a part of God, a part of the big Everything, both physical and spiritual.
Without wanting to offend anyone, I view Enlightenment's humanism as terribly absurd and arrogant. There is nothing infinitely more powerful than us human beings, really ? (That said, if I misunderstood that ideology, I apologize ; I'm just repeating what I learned about humanism when I was a student)

I dreamt I spoke with an angel up in some elevated realm, told me god was "all that is, was and will be" and "everywhere and everything" - this angel also showed me some of my previous lifetimes, on an animated map. what was really interesting, was that everybody in my dream resembled civil servants, even in a heavenly environment.

The 3 billion + year old organism that exists at the core of all life. The many faced god warring with itself. No way to prove it, but still interesting to think about.