Do you "believe" in God, or ...

[skr 1]

Topic drift from another thread
Subject: Do you believe in God?

Kind of hard to articulate what "God" means
so it's hard to know whether we are in the
same conversation or not.

But maybe "belief" is not a useful approach,
except for generating threads and stuff.

If I drop a brick and watch it fall, and if a
horse steps on my toe and it hurts, then I can
add it up and believe that if I drop a brick
on my toe, it will hurt.

That's belief.

If I actually drop the brick on my toe and it
hurts, then I no longer have to believe, I have
first hand, direct experience.

Isn't that what the spiritual traditions point
to? They don't say what God is, they say do
these things and you will have first hand, direct
experience.

Concrete steps that lead to predictable,
repeatable results.

People have been doing it for thousands of years.


Of course the organizations that grow up
around this can get pretty fucked up, and
you also have people running around killing
anyone who doesn't believe what they believe,
and that gives the whole deal a bad name.

But it doesn't change the original insights,
do these steps and get these results.


I had a couple problems with this. One is
that the steps and techniques and whatnot
didn't fit any model that I had learned
up to that point.

I wanted to figure it out, write a paper
on it, turn it in, and make an A :-) :-)

Failing that I wanted to just take acid
for a couple weeks and be there.


The idea that who I was and how I was
going about it wasn't ever going to get
me there, and that I had to change my
approach and start becoming a different
person was a long time in coming.

It's like a bunch of radios standing around
the parking lot talking about their belief
in a radio station. The idea to stop talking
and start turning the dial, start tuning in,
isn't obvious.


I remember one simple summary I heard once
on how to turn your dial

- Quiet your mind
- Open your heart
- Tell the truth
- Help others

That certainly didn't fit anything I had
learned in grad school!


Sometimes I think this stuff is one reason
I had such difficulty writing resumes for
job hunting back then.

"So tell me, Mr .. uh .. Skratch(??)
What have you been doing the last few years?"

"Well, uh .. well, living in my van at the
drop zone, and .. uh .. taking a lot of
acid and jumping out of airplanes and thinking
about god and .. uh .. uh ..."

Jeez, that was the most main stream stuff I
could come up with - I never had a chance :-) :-)

Skr