Hello!
Sorry for the time lag -- I was trying to formulate an effective response to what you wrote, and your response was so deep that I had to think about it for a while. <!-- s

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Wolfsnake Wrote:This is interesting to read, and outlines a lot of the reasons I never delved very deeply into Buddhism (and part of why I left the Catholic Church). If someone tells me I need to do something, I like to know why. If the only answer is "because you should," that really isn't very motivational.
I actually haven't been to many Buddhist organizations in person, when the focus has been expressly on Buddhism. There are things like festivals which celebrate the turning of the seasons, but these are more cultural in nature, not religious. Though living where I do, it isn't unusual to run across monks on the street (and actually when I was initially questioning Buddhism and speaking about it to an acquaintance for the first time in public, I was passed by two of them...which was odd), I haven't actually gone out of my way to know any.
I did initiate contact with a temple at one time, but was told later by family that that one temple was known for trying to get people to abandon their family and friends, which is not a good tactic if one wants to avoid being labeled as a harmful cult. I've also taken a class in Mindfulness meditation and yoga through my health plan, during which the question of the lack of female Buddhist authors was brought up (I avoided being scathing there by not commenting -- or rather accepting the fact that I was being talked over), and where I got the message that "thinking too much" is looked down upon. These two things are indicative of a greater pattern that has led me to distance myself from the religion. I'm not sure if I need to explain that much more here, except I'll note that the "thinking too much" thing is probably a retort to people questioning Buddhist doctrines, and the lack of female Buddhist authors is probably because women have a tendency to be relegated to lower status within Buddhism...so it's like why devote oneself to a system that sees one as inferior?
Wolfsnake Wrote:I also have trouble with the lack of true self. I believe very firmly in a true self. The thought that everyone is merely a collection of impulses or memories, or that everyone has some universal fundamental nature, and we are lost until we realize it, ignores the beauty, variation, uniqueness, and depth of personality in everyone. I don't think consciousness is an obstacle course with the exact same prize at the end for every person. Everyone is a little bit different. Everyone has something unique that they alone can bring into this world. That is what I believe.
The "true self" thing is interesting for me because for the last 12 years I've been devoted to finding out who I actually am. When I graduated from high school, I had no idea who I was, though I think that this was likely because I'd not had experiences to bounce off of while there (I was pretty much an outcast for the first two or so years of high school, and for the latter two I was either marginally accepted, or accepted by people older than myself). What I've found is that it's difficult for one to know who one is when one is denied opportunities to "bump into" ideas or people whom one is different from or disagrees with, or who know more about specific things than one. From that perspective, meditating all the time (as advocated in Zen) isn't necessarily the best way to find out who one is, because that isn't really interacting with anyone else. It would be hard to know who one is, when one isn't actually dealing with others -- so of course a doctrine that says that there is no true self would make sense to someone in isolation.
Again that metaphor comes up about being some kind of transparent substance that can't see itself until it runs up against something else, or something else runs into it. If what one is doing is isolating oneself and being only among people who have the same views as oneself, of course it would be hard to be able to see any uniqueness there, because one is staying still and being around other people who are also staying still, or moving with one in a way so as not to collide (like a school of fish). This would make it hard for anyone to run into anyone else (though as I've said before, I have not been party to temple activities which expressly deal with religion, so I am not sure how often conflict comes up and is acknowledged as real [and not just a growing pain], at temple).
Wolfsnake Wrote:I was a fairly devout Catholic in my late teens and early twenties--I had a brief bout of doubt and atheism prior to that, which made me really sit down and think about things, and return with a stronger faith than the sort of wishy-washy "this is what we do" I'd grown up with. I was working towards becoming a Secular Franciscan (basically one step below holy orders), considered joining a convent, and honestly thought if I'd been born male, I would have gravitated towards the priesthood. I idolized St. Francis of Assissi (still do, to be honest) and went to church every Sunday and holy day. This was before I realized that I was queer (FtM/N and gay), and would not have been able to remain a Catholic in good standing anyway.
Yeah, I also considered joining a convent. <!-- s

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--> Being on medication which drops my libido way down helps with this (as one isn't supposed to have sexual pleasure when one is a Buddhist monk or nun). I think I'm too fiery and independent-minded to do well in that position, though -- I'd likely end up leaving or dying of cancer (bottled-up stresses and malcontentments and undermined serious issues aren't good for the body). I like the term FtM/N. <!-- s

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Wolfsnake Wrote:There were so many choices and sacrifices and beauties and natural ways of being that the Church called "wrong" that I could see nothing wrong with. I had to maintain such a high degree of cognitive dissonance between my conscience and my religion that I started to worry my personality would fracture.
Yeah, that's a reason to stay out... <!-- s

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Wolfsnake Wrote:I still admire Christ and still think his life was worth emulating. He was an original peace-and-love hippy, a grass-roots bleeding-heart liberal. I just don't believe his dad is the only god out there.
I have no idea about anything Christian, but I've heard that Christ was kind of not as peaceful as people have said (with tearing up the marketplace and things). I see no reason to believe that God/desses don't exist, but at the same time, they don't presently figure all that strongly into my life. It actually took a while and a bit of deliberate thought to try and figure out what other people meant when they talked about "God"; and what I meant when I talked about "God." I called it my "God Project:" that is, what was "God" to me? The end result that I came up with is the Spirit field -- a point existing outside of 4-dimensional reality (3 dimensions plus time), which is seen to pervade all points and instances when viewed from within space-time (and which, incidentally, grants the reality of self-awareness to living beings [EDIT: by which I mean beings which are designed to tap Spirit] existing within space-time). Of course, though, that's just a projection; I could be terribly wrong, but it's fun to think about. <!-- s

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--> The major problem that I have with this model is that in it, I am invariably a symbiote while living; that is, the "I" that experiences itself as [insert birth name here], is partially formed by the experiences and responses to that experience, of this life ("birth name"), and possibly partially inherited from the experiences of other prior lives (Bell [plus, possibly, "birth name"]). "Spirit" is that which enables any of this deliberation to go on at all; which enables any *thing* to look out from these eyes while writing a post to you, instead of simply existing as a mechanical being which goes about all of these activities with no consciousness. So in addition to being a symbiote on the level of containing Bell, this life also qualifies as symbiotic by being a combined phenomena of matter (which is transient in form) and spirit (which is all-pervasive). I still haven't figured out what the final implications of this are, however.
Wolfsnake Wrote:Speaking of religion, I think spirituality and religion get mixed up so often that it's hard to say which is which, or where a dividing line might be. The dictionary definitions and popular-knowledge definitions are awfully ambiguous. Ask 10 people what the difference and similarities are and you'll get a dozen answers, some of them quite prejudiced against "religion" because of that word's association with certain organized groups, and some of them perjorative towards "spirituality" due to its treatment in popular media.
What, you mean "Charmed"? <!-- s

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--> Yeah, I've seen a lot of this pejorative stuff being doled out by people who consider themselves to be religious, against people who, they say, "pick and choose" what to believe in. (As though one should find a preconceived set of beliefs and hold rigidly to it, because any personal intimations as to what the universe is or how it works, is bound to be false.) I have a really hard time believing that anyone can "pick and choose" their beliefs, however. A person's core beliefs are their core beliefs; any "picking and choosing" that actually occurred on a deep level, would have to do with trying to find the nearest external belief that approximates those core beliefs.
It's like how I use the term Spirit instead of "God"; I realize that this could parallel "Holy Spirit," (though I don't think I know anything concretely about the "Holy Spirit") but there is no other term that expresses an encompassment of small spirits, or of an all-pervasive spirit which enacts itself within individual lives so that we project and believe in other spirits as existing. These small "spirits" also act as though they too exist, even though we as living beings who contain Spirit, generate them from within ourselves: all beings who contain any point of Spirit by necessity contain all information that is in all of Spirit at any point in space-time. Therefore any spirit who we can imagine to exist externally also can be generated from within ourselves (although normally, this is limited by our personal bodily [matter-based] experience and our creativity, and self-imposed creative limits).
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Wolfsnake Wrote:I refer to myself as religious, because I work within an organized group. However, nearly all of what I do could also easily be called spiritual. So go figure, I guess?
Yes; I work with my family, and some family friends on an informal level...I also deal with spirit contact, which is also a bit social. However I wouldn't consider myself religious, because usually when I see the term it mostly refers to people who accept a worldview that they did not create, themselves, and who then hold to that worldview. I find myself in the "spirituality" camp because my beliefs are up for revision at any time. If I tried to codify my beliefs so that others could accept them as their own, the project would likely fail, because my beliefs would likely change once I got started. So I find myself in the, "spiritual, not religious," camp, even though my commitment to my spirituality is at least as strong as others' religious beliefs. I'm just a lot more fluid than most people I know...