Quote:
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Originally Posted by Greenslade
Our beliefs are formed in many ways and experience is the least of them. What we actually experience is the 'mechanical', physical process but our reality is formed from our perceptions - perceptions are reality. How our perceptions are formed is a different matter entirely but this is where our beliefs are created. Often beliefs are agenda.
I agree there.
So we're the product of random happenstance and there is no rhyme nor reason to existence?
I made the choice to be here, what you believe or not is up to you. Many people believe that we did indeed make the choice to be here while others didn't. If we didn't make the choice, then what?
I do. I'm currently taking a course to become a cognitive behaviour therapist because this is where my current interests lie with Spirituality. I want to know where my beliefs come from and how they are formed, what I don't want to do is pack my skull full of nonsense just so I can wear the Spiritual badge.
The question does arise for me because I am interested in such things. I want to know, I want to understand. Even in pre-Christian days people believed they were at the beck-and-call of the gods or stars that directed their fates, and karma seems to be another power that has taken on that same role. The old wives' tales are still very much alive and kicking.
So tell me if you will. Where does karma lie when there is no time, or all of time affects all of time all of the time? When karma - cause and effect - is a construct of a mind that's within linear time? You see, sometimes cause precedes affect, so how does that affect karma?
People have the Free Will to believe that there is such a thing as karma, that it is out to get you if you're not a good person. People also have the Free Will to reject anything that erodes the whole idea of karma. The bottom line, however, is that agenda and cognitive processes dictate beliefs and not Spirituality.
So we have the Free Will to use our imagination and have created our own worlds, can we not create a world in which we have Free Will or did we have the Free Will to create a world where we didn't have the Free Will, that we were victims of yet another external force of our own creations?
Or maybe the concept that we create our own realities is another pile of hocum? If we created our own realities, don't we also create everything that is within that reality - including the paranoia that karma brings?
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I'll try Greenslade, to put my side of the discussion in another way.
Whether we like it or not each of us has arrived at the present. In fact the whole universe has arrived at the present. All of universal nature in all its diverse forms has arrived where we are. We (that which effects us directly)humans all have a name, a form, a mother and a father and each of us is wherever we are and each of is is as he or she is. I am at the moment sitting on a chair in front of a window which gives me a view of woods and occasionally persons going by. I am as I am thanks to all that has ever happened to me in all its forms - I can say, categorically, that the whole universe has played its role in creating the person I am now. The same is valid for everyone. There are those who are happy about having reached this 'stage' we call the present - a stage which constantly alters - and there are those who are very unhappy thanks to everything the universe has done to them or for them.
If I view this from a history of karma then obviously I did something, or most things right, that is according to some outlined plan or conception or system or whatever - so life has treated me accordingly.
I have apparently harvested what I have sown. Not that I can remember what seed I sowed. My neighbour, a much younger man doesn't have it so 'nice' and is in hospital fighting for his life and his whole family is worried sick. I don't know what he did or what he didn't sow. I'm not quite sure if he even knows what has been expected of him - which would be another theme.
However I now think, after decades of reading, hearing and discussing karma - and my bookcase is full, now look upon my being here - in this condition or situation we call the present, is due to evolution.
In fact had the word evolution existed before the human quest came into being as a search for an/the answer to the big question maybe we wouldn't have let our imagination(s) run such riot. Evolution is due to the acts of opposition or opposites each causing uncountable feedbacks to everything involved in opposition.
Like karma you say - yes, but in complete freedom. No Yoke. No boundaries.
We are all in the same position, so you'll understand that if I say each of us is body and mind this is valid for all of us in the human race. We like to hear ourselves say that we are 'souls' clothed in an incarnated (meat) body. Although we have not the slightest idea how this works.
So duly, I have now altered my perspective and say that it's our minds that are incarnated. And we underestimate the power the mind has and the part it plays in our lives both individually and collective.
This mind in which we have our part is the seat of all creation although formless and unseen. I'm not talking God here, that which we attribute to a god - morals, goodness, evil, light-giving, justice, miracles and so on, is a figment of our very, very fertile imaginations.
Look around the planet; all that is not organic has been created by human hands, hands led by human minds working inside human brains. All having slowly progressed through evolution.
A true wonder.