Ying and yang-the original paradox

This it seems is constantly coming up here. Apparently the eastern religions have had it worked out long ago.
So instead of rationality vs faith we have 'educated guesses'.
Instead of science and religion we try to incorporate both into some type of more holistic phlisophy .
We use male and female energies or left and right brain to engage more of our brain. This has also been called 'active' and 'recepetive'.
Classic hoistic ontolgy refers to the 'Lover' and the 'Beloved' and the importance of understanding both roles when describing the states of mind one should cultivate.
In magic circles initiates such as Crowley would refer to the "Hadit"(male) and 'Nuit'(female) , as differing aspects of the one being for understanding the basics of applied magic.
And on it goes.

So far the mainstream has only recognized quantum theory and work in psychology by Jung and some others as a way forward in human understanding, that we need a more holistic appraisal of the world we find ourselves in.


Quantum has revealed that (1)scientists who include themselves as a variable in their experiments are likely to get much more accurate answers . Also that (2)most of what we consider to be 'solid' is actually empty. Further, (3)that the 'solid world' behaves as particles when we view it directly, and as waves when we turn away.
To me these are the most important discoveries by quantum which incidentally have been revealed by mystics thousands of years ago... quantum has just proved it.

Meanwhile Jung has used the terms "collective unconscious" and "archetypes" to describe in a more holistic way why people are mentally unsound.
The idea of "archetypes",(common human psychological states, ideas and realizations, which are supposed to be universal across all human cultures), originate from the 'collective unconscious', which elsewhere has been termed the "noosesphere'. The nooseshpere is said to contain ALL human memories, thoughts, dreams,etc. which one can draw upon to give meaning to their own situations.


On this forum spirituality is rarely viewed from such a holistic view (ie. that science and religion should stand side by side in determining the best possible model for how the universe works), instead we have cheap point scoring and dogged defense of one's views, because of the perceived flaws in the others views rather than trying to extracate the good from the bad from doctrines such as Christianity, where it is all too obvious from threads like stellpalfie's " the wrong priority" that all is not well in just swallowing the tripe we are told accept.

Originally posted by karoly aczel
This it seems is constantly coming up here. Apparently the eastern religions have had it worked out long ago.
So instead of rationality vs faith we have 'educated guesses'.
Instead of science and religion we try to incorporate both into some type of more holistic phlisophy .
We use male and female energies or left and right brain to engage more of ...[text shortened]... all is not well in just swallowing the tripe we are told accept.

I bet thats a pic of a snake eating a giant lizard 🙂

Originally posted by tim88
I bet thats a pic of a snake eating a giant lizard 🙂

It is,[profile pic]. It's from a series of 8 or nine over about a 3 or 4 hour period.
I think both snake and lizard had a fair chance of beating (and eating) the other, but this time the snake won.
And eventually, when we get to about the eighth pic, we see only the tip of the lizards tail poking out the the snakes mouth.
Lets thank those crazy mine protestors ,who travel far and wide to stop wholesale slaughter of fauna and flora in the quest for uranium or whatever, but also have an eye for the more baffling things going on in the desert.

Originally posted by karoly aczel
This it seems is constantly coming up here. Apparently the eastern religions have had it worked out long ago.
So instead of rationality vs faith we have 'educated guesses'.
Instead of science and religion we try to incorporate both into some type of more holistic phlisophy .
We use male and female energies or left and right brain to engage more of all is not well in just swallowing the tripe we are told accept.

If religions would abandon the notion that they are literally true, they might play a useful role.

Originally posted by rwingett
If religions would abandon the notion that they are literally true, they might play a useful role.

Exactly.
We dont even really have a consistent language to describe what the hell they're talking about. The Christian conception of a god-entity has long been shot down, so when I say 'god' and a theist says it , they mean totally different things.

If only Christians and other theists admit they dont know it all, that they can learn more from others, then real change could prevail.

Originally posted by rwingett
If religions would abandon the notion that they are literally true, they might play a useful role.

That might work for all religions except Christianity. If Jesus is not the Son of God and He did not give His blood to pay our sin debt and He did not raise His body from the dead to prove His power over death, then we have no hope of salvation and the resurrection of our own bodies to life everlasting. We are only miserable human beings waiting our fate.

The Instructor

Originally posted by karoly aczel
This it seems is constantly coming up here. Apparently the eastern religions have had it worked out long ago.
So instead of rationality vs faith we have 'educated guesses'.
Instead of science and religion we try to incorporate both into some type of more holistic phlisophy .
We use male and female energies or left and right brain to engage more of ...[text shortened]... all is not well in just swallowing the tripe we are told accept.

It is quite trendy for Eastern religion to hijack Quantum Physics for validation these days. But I don't buy it.

Let's address the first of your three numbered claims. I have read that we cannot measure a system without affecting it, but that sounds far different than 'scientists ... [including] themselves as a variable'. Did you simply reword the well-known experimental findings to sound more in step with your mysticism, or are you making a more substantial claim?

Originally posted by RJHinds
That might work for all religions except Christianity. If Jesus is not the Son of God and He did not give His blood to pay our sin debt and He did not raise His body from the dead to prove His power over death, then we have no hope of salvation and the resurrection of our own bodies to life everlasting. We are only miserable human beings waiting our fate.

The Instructor

That's one possible interpretation, but by no means the only possible one.

The infantile yearning for "life everlasting" would have to be abandoned, but it might open other, possibly richer, possibilities.

It may be, for example, that our understanding of 'god' has matured somewhat since the 1st century. So while we are increasingly unable to relate to 'god' as 1st century Israelites did, we may have evolved to a richer, more nuanced, understanding of what god is, or might be. An understanding that is not complete, even now, and that will continue to become richer and more complete as we move forward.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
It is quite trendy for Eastern religion to hijack Quantum Physics for validation these days. But I don't buy it.

Let's address the first of your three numbered claims. I have read that we cannot measure a system without affecting it, but that sounds far different than 'scientists ... [including] themselves as a variable'. Did you simply reword the wel ...[text shortened]... dings to sound more in step with your mysticism, or are you making a more substantial claim?

I haven't reworded anything to fit. I think I numbered the major basic common points for me.

To tell you the truth, I'm not so big on validating my so-called 'faith' by deferring to quantum theory. I mainly site that example to speak to science minded people, of which there are many on a chess site.

Of course the main paradox here is that the Newtonian 3-d 'solid' world, which people have used to differentiate between the physical and the non-physical, is actually empty.
That which seems solid is actually empty.... Or as the mantra goes : "form is emptiness, emptiness is form."

But like I said, even without Quantum my basic critique stands.

ie. To get a better understanding of the world we must be open to all avenues of thought from all polarities.

Originally posted by karoly aczel... site ...

cite

just saying, hope you don't mind

Originally posted by karoly aczel
This it seems is constantly coming up here. Apparently the eastern religions have had it worked out long ago.
So instead of rationality vs faith we have 'educated guesses'.
Instead of science and religion we try to incorporate both into some type of more holistic phlisophy .
We use male and female energies or left and right brain to engage more of all is not well in just swallowing the tripe we are told accept.

Having read this several times over several days I still have no idea what you are actually proposing except that other people (apart from you) have had other ideas and expressions about the meaning of life and mental well being which you reference; but as usual I have no idea you you personally are proposing, agree with or stand for. I don't have an issue with this except that you have an issue with what I propose and stand for.

Originally posted by divegeester
Having read this several times over several days I still have no idea what you are actually proposing except that other people (apart from you) have had other ideas and expressions about the meaning of life and mental well being which you reference; but as usual I have no idea you you personally are proposing, agree with or stand for. I don't have an issue with this except that you have an issue with what I propose and stand for.

All I'm trying to say is that one should have an holistic approach to life.

One should use both sides of her brain.

Seems that people here are either atheist/science orientated or faith/religious . I'm just saying that one should embrace both as both have some valid truths.

Which "valid thruths" can be found exclusively in religion and which can be found exclusively in atheism/science?

Originally posted by Great King Rat
Which "valid thruths" can be found exclusively in religion and which can be found exclusively in atheism/science?

Well for me their is just one knowledge, one truth. (More like 'truisms' but lets no go there for now).

Atheism refers to human rights and the rationale of science to make it's case that it is a better than religion/spirituality when it comes to understanding the truth of this life.
Spirituality/Religion tries to address the unknowns in one's life like death, humanities origins , etc.
Somehow in the west we have separated into these two seemingly contradictory stances on life as we know it.
In the east the Vedas have long looked at human life as a mix of both sides. The Vedas cover all aspects of humanity including health and science.


So I guess that historically religion/spirituality would have tried to give one a perspective into one's origins and what may confront someone upon their death whereas science would tell us the hard truths in the form of equations about our world that are so consistent as to be able to be utilized by engineers,etc. to build stuff in the real world.

So Einsteinian relativity works great for large physics like the movements of planets and suns while Newtonian physics works fine on our human scale , but as we get down to the extremely small these two seem to break down and quantum theory had to be developed to try to show scientists what happens at this miniature scale. Only a theory which includes both states of being (particle and wave) can really explain what happens at such a small level of existence.

The Tao and the ying yang diagram shows quite eloquently how you cannot have one state of being without the other. Both are part of the whole. The seen and the unseen, the formed and the void, etc. all the way into stuff like human behaviour where we have the server and the enjoyer, the leader and the follower, the verbose and the receptive,etc.
as the best way to explain the phenomena we perceive.

I started out with an atheistic view of the world. When I found my own spirituality I had to reconcile my spiritual views with the facts uncovered by science. The age of the Earth and radioactive isotope dating, the big bang theory, evolution and the other established scientific findings about the world we live in all had to fit into my overall view of reality.
That's why I like Buddhism. It declares that there is no god despite having one branch of Buddhism that implores it's followers to 'take refuge' in Amitabha Buddha ,( basically devote themselves totally to Amitabha Buddha for 'salvation'via chanting and visualizations), while other branches of Buddhism implores its followers to do good works and to spread the truth of dharma as the main tenets to adhere to while other branches teach meditation or yoga as the principle tenets to practice.

Basically Buddhism is a good example of how a good religion should work. It adapts to it's environment and also it's adepts- Buddhists who moved to different regions had to adapt to different diets, even meat diets given that they were beggars. It developed different aspects of divinity as it recognized that different people had different 'truths' to develop, that not all people needed the same lessons in life.
It is only the living religion as exemplified by living adepts that keeps Buddhism relevant.
Similarly any spiritual code worth it's salt will always be more than just words in a book.

I dont understand why todays 'truth seekers' cant factor in the ideas and 'truths' of people from the past.
I did. I weighed up Christianity, Eastern mysticism, other histories as well as insights by writers and scientists from all walks and all ages before making a decision on who I thought I was and what principles I followed. (I came up with my own brand 'no religion' which took into consideration all that I considered relative while also retaining my own spiritual ideas, but for the purposes of clarity in this forum have decided to call myself a 'Hindu'. Ultimately Hinduism describes my belief system the best because it has tolerance,a peaceful outlook and a recognition of the differences in humans as it advocates different paths and methods for different people.)