Originally posted by forkedknight
So your explanation for these things is "I don't know or care to try and explain it". I'm totally fine with that.
Other people need more than that in life. They need to take their best shot at explaining 'why', so they turn to religion or spirituality of one kind or another.
As far as that is concerned, I'm not sure why some people are so up i ...[text shortened]... se into places it doesn't belong (read science and logic) that people get upset.
So your explanation for these things is "I don't know or care to try and explain it". I'm totally fine with that.
No. First, that wouldn’t be an “explanation”. Second, I didn’t say anything about “don’t care to try”—something either has a reasonable explanation, that fits the facts, or it doesn’t; or among otherwise reasonable explanations, there is a best one (currently) or there is not. Third, I really have no problem with speculation about possible explanations, as long as realizes and admits that one is engaging in speculation.
My only point in that aside is that sometimes “I don’t know” is a valid answer, indeed the best answer, even in cases where someone has an interest in the subject.
Other people need more than that in life. They need to take their best shot at explaining 'why', so they turn to religion or spirituality of one kind or another.
I have no problem with taking one’s best shot, for whatever reason. But everything I said about reasons and soundness still applies to the explanations. That is not to say that such things as stories and myths and such do not have an aesthetic value—in terms of the aesthetics by which we also live our lives, including the spiritual—even if they are not taken as propositional assertions.
I am mostly a Zen Buddhist, by the way. My spiritual life is by no means dry. That does not mean that I accept all the metaphysics (“explanations” ) of Buddhism, such as reincarnation. In line with twhitehead’s apple-tree analogy, what conditions would have to be there for reincarnation to be a reasonable explanation? (I don’t know offhand; that’s really a rhetorical question.)
I think if religions stuck to doing what they're good at -- explaining the unexplainable, and providing a comforting community for people in hard times -- the world would be a much more tolerant place.
Explaining the unexplainable is, by definition, not possible. However, pointing to the ineffable (again, through story, myth, parable, poetry, Zen koans) is. In that sense, religious language is really iconographic, and need not become idolatrous.
I see no reason to assert, however, that the grammar of our consciousness is exhaustive of the syntax of the totality in which and of which we are. If we insist on making up explanations for the mystery in order to think that the mystery is no longer mysterious, that is illusion. If a reasonable explanation presents itself, then
that aspect of the cosmos may no longer be mystery; but that ought not to be taken as meaning that there is no longer
any mystery. How will you know if you understand everything? How will you know if it is possible to understand everything? (Rhetorical questions, again.)
However, again, how that is done may have rich aesthetic value—no small thing, since the aesthetics of how we live our lives, and view the world of which we are, is what adds richness.
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Sit quietly. Become aware of your surroundings without naming or thinking about them. Become aware of your place in them. Become aware, perhaps, that—just as there is no perceivable figure without a ground—there is really no strict separation between yourself and your surroundings: all is inseparably entangled. Those are just words, and words and thoughts and names are not the thing. Do not force your awareness anywhere, let it move as it will. If you become aware of thinking, just notice how your thoughts arise in the field of your awareness, as do birds or clouds or the sound of an airplane.
Sense the non-separability, the wholeness, the coherence of everything just-as-it-is in its just-so-suchness, of which you also are.
Then you are in touch with
the real, which is prior to thinking about it. Then think about it however you wish; wonder about it. Make whatever mental, conceptual thought-maps are helpful, that seem reasonable. Just don’t confuse the map with the territory; or insist that the territory conform to your maps, rather than the other way around.
That is the beginning of spirituality (for lack of a better word). It begins, not with thoughts and explanations, but with
aware-fully touching the real that is prior to any of your ideas about it. And, after all your thinking, or my thinking—good or bad—it ends with touching the real as well.
Be well. 🙂