Faith

What is it?

Do you need it?

Does it 'just happen', or do you need to cultivate it?

Faith is an escape from immenent Logic and evidential truth for a person who simply remains within a bubble of delusional thinking.
It is not a necessary way of thinking or is it necessary to have,it would need cultivation in a naturaly reasonable mind.But if you are truly gullable then faith would be contageous unto you,like the little bug that it tends to be in my POV.

...faith is not a bubble, nor is it 'that kind' of escape in my perspective. Transmutation is necessary, which is a totally different kind of escape. We escape the world at large by going inside the shell / body. The difference between intellectual animals and humans is faith. I think the faith that most people talk about here is pseudo-secular. Faith and real faith (knowing) are 2 different kinds of faith. It's not about covering your eyes and ears and praying / hoping for the best. It takes serious work. It 'boils down' to self mastery.

-------

Sorry for the copy and paste, it's just such good material.

The current state of humanity: animals with intellect.When the Intelligent Principle, the Monad, sends its spark of consciousness into Nature, that spark, the anima, enters into manifestation as a simple mineral. Gradually, over millions of years, the anima gathers experience and evolves up the chain of life until it perfects itself in the level of the mineral kingdom. It then graduates into the plant kingdom, and subsequently into the animal kingdom. With each ascension the spark receives new capacities and higher grades of complexity. In the animal kingdom it learns procreation by ejaculation. When that animal intelligence enters into the human kingdom, it receives a new capacity: reasoning, the intellect; it is now an anima with intellect: an Intellectual Animal. That spark must then perfect itself in the human kingdom in order to become a complete and perfect Human Being, an entity that has conquered and transcended everything that belongs to the lower kingdoms. Unfortunately, very few Intellectual Animals perfect themselves; most remain enslaved by their animal nature, and thus are reabsorbed by Nature, a process belonging to the Devolving side of life and called by all the great religions "Hell" or the Second Death.
"The present manlike being is not yet human; he is merely an intellectual animal. It is a very grave error to call the legion of the “I” the “soul.” In fact, what the manlike being has is the psychic material, the material for the soul within his Essence, but indeed, he does not have a Soul yet." - Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic
"I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar With angels blest; but even from angelhood I must pass on: all except God doth perish. When I have sacrificed my angel-soul, I shall become what no mind e'er conceived. Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence Proclaims in organ tones, To Him we shall return." - Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207 – 1273) founder of the Mevlevi order of Sufism

Strife, I know that I can't explain what I know. In a word, mercy. In a poor attempt at an explanation I'll say I know that God is in everyone.

Anything further is like asking the question "who do you think is more enlightened, me or you?"

it still seems to me like you only think you know, or feel you know. (faith)

though i like the word humility better, imo i think saying that everyone is their own god would be more reasonable than saying god is in everyone.

if god is anything but a being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe, the principal object of faith and worship in monotheistic religions, i think we should use proper terms such as if you think god is energy use the word energy instead of god. if you think god is a unexplainable force call it just that, and not god. that way we can keep miscommunication and misunderstanding at a minimum.

i can accept "i believe in energy" i could even accept "i believe in an unexplainable force" though i wouldn't believe it myself... but wouldn't suppress the idea of that being a possibility. Nor would i disagree with you saying "energy is in everyone". i have a hard time accepting the annotation "god is in everyone"

its giving up questioning and the pursuit of finding answers


this summarizes my view better

eye exaggerate said:

... "who do you think is more enlightened, me or you?"

Click to expand...

Can it matter?
"Before enlightenment ... carry water; chop wood.
After enlightenment ... carry water, chop wood."
cn

i am not enlightened, just conscious and aware of myself and my thinking. finding an accepting humility when i am wrong. not pretending to know things that i do not know.

cannabineer said:

Can it matter?
"Before enlightenment ... carry water; chop wood.
After enlightenment ... carry water, chop wood."
cn

Click to expand...

...that was my point for sure It doesn't.

Zaehet Strife said:

i am not enlightened, just conscious and aware of myself and my thinking. finding an accepting humility when i am wrong. not pretending to know things that i do not know.

Click to expand...

...I'm not making any claims. I'm talking about what I understand. No pretending.

And Strife, this is utmost humility. I strive toward it always. And, sometimes I don't. I know what it feels like to be corrected. I don't know if it ever ends.

eye exaggerate said:

Strife, I know that I can't explain what I know. In a word, mercy. In a poor attempt at an explanation I'll say I know that God is in everyone.

Anything further is like asking the question "who do you think is more enlightened, me or you?"

Click to expand...

...a little more in context.

its easy to pretend to understand something that you really don't understand. i like you eye you have a lot of awesome things to say, but i think sometimes our hopes can get in the way of reasonable thinking. the only thing i claim to understand about theology and metaphysics or the unexplainable is that there are no absolutes, and that nothing is certain, no matter how hard i hope.

Zaehet Strife said:

i can accept "i believe in energy" i could even accept "i believe in an unexplainable force" though i wouldn't believe it myself... but wouldn't suppress the idea of that being a possibility. Nor would i disagree with you saying "energy is in everyone". i have a hard time accepting the annotation "god is in everyone"

Click to expand...

...that's fair. That energy does reside in all. Covered by layers and layers of experiences which tend to dictate how we see the world around us.

Zaehet Strife said:

its easy to pretend to understand something that you really don't understand. i like you eye you have a lot of awesome things to say, but i think sometimes our hopes can get in the way of reasonable thinking. the only thing i claim to understand about theology and metaphysics or the unexplainable is that there are no absolutes, and that nothing is certain, no matter how hard i hope.

Click to expand...

...thanks. I like what you're writing here as well. Hope is separate from faith (imo). I can't describe the events leading up to my understanding - for obvious reasons. I come back again to mercy. Hesod. You have to feel it, you can't think it.

...can you describe your view of pretending? What I'm writing here has been written for a very long time. I understood it, then read it. It's an odd order, but, it is what it is.

its like... you have an idea, or a thought. whether it came from you or someone else it doesn't really matter. you put faith behind that thought because you want it to be true, or you put understanding behind that thought because you want to understand it. whos to say that your understanding isn't misinterpreted, or isn't flawed. if there is a possibility for it to be flawed, i think faith should be out of the question, and replaced by possibility. what we think could be true, what we hope could be true, what we have faith in could be true, what we think we understand we could very well understand correctly... but there is always room for falsehood. we could be wrong, or we could misunderstand, the possibility is always present regardless of how much faith someone has.

Strife, we can always be wrong, you're right on that. But I don't think faith is a matter of right and wrong. I think it's a matter of being both right and wrong, pretty much at the same time. Faith doesn't come from an active searching with our known senses. It can't be taught, but outer life points the way if we're watching.

Possibility and potentiality are the product of a unified mind. Here's that lemniscate image again - symbolically the center of that shape "X", "chi", etc. is where pure potentiality can be found. If faith is made possible by uniting the hemispheres of the brain, then you get where I'm going with this. The third eye and faith are synonymous. This is not a reference to drugs that I'm making with regard (ha!) to the third eye.

do you believe in samsara and the rebirth and death cycle? and the possible escape through moksha? or am i headed in completely the wrong direction lol.

Zaehet Strife said:

do you believe in samsara and the rebirth and death cycle? and the possible escape through moksha? or am i headed in completely the wrong direction lol.

Click to expand...

...here's to your 777th post I do believe in the death and rebirth cycle - "unless a man be born again". Not making that escape is described in Christianity as Hell, or the second death. Moksha, Paradise, and other related terms describe liberation. It's also known as surrender (which places the onus squarely on us). The parallel in Buddhist terms, to my knowledge, is Shambhala. This is a place of peace that has no walls or bricks etc. In Christianity we'd see this as the new jerusalem symbolized by the seal of solomon. The upward triangle (male) and the downward triangle (female) unite and form a vehicle which takes us to that place. Ezekiel points to this also.

To me, the coolest part of all this study and revelation is that it all points back to the same place. It's funny how escape in this context means to go inside to that place of peace. I hope to get closer to it. So far, I'm aware of the spark, both in myself and in others. Now, to make that thing shine!