I dont believe

Personally I don't do believe or not believe ...but I do do being open to everything ( well at least I try ) now being open ....ends a lot of conflict & needless discussion

[psychoslice]

To believe in anything is to take hold of it and and to protect it, every single thing that we believe in, is only what we perceive it to be using our limited senses as a so called human being, what we believe in is not what something else with a different sense mechanism would believe in or perceive. Everything is in the flow of pure Consciousness, beliefs try to take a portion out of the flow of Consciousness and label it, to have a belief is to die with this illusionary portion.

Originally Posted by psychoslice

Straight for who ?.

straight for anyone who cares......

My relationship with belief ...and this is personal I can't lay this on anyone else, is that once a belief for me is set & capped it takes a lot of effort to remove it later down the line if it is deemed to be invalid. If others can play around a bit more effectively than I can with beliefs ...then good

Originally Posted by not human

My relationship with belief ...and this is personal I can't lay this on anyone else, is that once a belief for me is set & capped it takes a lot of effort to remove it later down the line if it is deemed to be invalid. If others can play around a bit more effectively than I can with beliefs ...then good

"....is that once a belief for me is set & capped it takes a lot of effort to remove it later down the line....." Just one reason I don't do belief.....

If I don't have enough information and/or evidence about a matter then it stays as it is - uncertain. I won't substitute belief (or faith) in something if there's insufficient evidence to understand why it is substantially correct.

That doesn't mean knowing everything about everything because firstly that's not possible and secondly it would be unnecessary for me anyway.

Enough for me to work on until there are additions to what I currently understand will do me nicely, thank you.

I totally respect that .. there is nothing wrong with the belief there is nothing beyond this life .. but won't it be quite a pleasant surprises if there is something after all this is over .. just a thought:))

An open-mind is fine as long as you are searching for truth and know when you find it. Some people keep an open-mind and pass truths right on by and continue keeping an opened mind. lol

I normally pay attention to my senses telling me if something is probable or not. It's normally true when it is probable at least in my own experience.

Originally Posted by Raybre80

I dont believe in god or the bible, I dont believe in afterlife or spirits or demons, I believe in energy, I think when we die our bodies decompose and our energy returns to the earth....

I do believe that MAYBE some engery can be dispursed into the atmosphere and maybe thats why some odd things can happen that people can not explain...who knows.

I kind of agree wit your point and disagree, it would all depend on your deeper view of the subject in question.
To speak about things like this is so hard cause we are so quick to judge each other, forgetting to keep our glasses/minds half empty and always ready to receive new information and let old one go if necessary. I'm not trying to say that's what you're doing at all, only stating how hard it is to picture it depending on how different our lives and ways of thinking may be :)

I for one do believe in the god in the context of a force which is everything.
I don't believe in God as a ruler judging the choices in my life.
I Believe God to be just as much a part of me as I'm a part of it, I believe it simply to be the Prana/Chi/Kundalini/Lifeforce, from where all life springs.

I believe in the Bible in the context that it's a book written ages ago like a history book. I also believe the words of the bible are colored just like the Sutras of Buddha, The journeys of Krishna etc. And that we should read between the line.
it doesn't matter whether or not Jesus walked on water or turned water into wine, just as little as it matters whether lotus flowers where grown under Siddhartha's every footstep he took right after his birth etc.
Somethings we should leave to be myth and legend without questioning whether they are true or not, and instead listen to the message given, which to me seems to be very similar from both Jesus and Siddhartha. And none of them actually asked people to worship them, they simply asked people to follow their way = To live like them.
And to be even more honest, they hardly even asked that, they wanted people to find for themselves.

If you're familiar with Dharma Sangha (Buddha boy, the guy who meditated without food and water for 6 years in Nepal, if not there's a Discovery documentary on him you can find on youtube, just search for Buddha boy) what he seems to have done is to most people in the west a miracle if something. While to the Dzogchen masters of Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, ladakh and Tibet he is just an example of pure devotional power.

the Discovery documentary tries hard to debunk him (that's what we want to do here in the west, debunk stuff, which many times can be good), but without any real success.
Now after watching this documentary I would like you to search for some of his speeches on youtube. Actually I can find them both for you (but u need to add dots cause I'm a newbie :P

Discovery documentary: www youtube com/watch?v=v29clGMWU84

Short doc after hsi 6 years + an interview: www youtube com /watch?v=X8OzRlPvfWk&feature=player_embedded

(Please remember the language barrier, and what may sound like overly "holy" words to us is in fact everyday words in Pali/Sanskrit. Dharma = teaching, way, path.
Also there are no outer Gods in Buddhism (and probably not in original pre-Hinduism too?) All the deities in Vajrayana and mayahana are simply symbols of your inner deeper nature. Like Buddha means nothing more than Awake. Buddhahood = Awakened one etc.
Tara is a Bodhisattva and symbol of the female awaken energy inherent in us all.
Avalokitesvara is the bodhisattva symol of our limitless inherent compassion etc etc).


What I want to show by this is that it doesn't matter how authentic his meditation was or not, and how much we can debunk it. What matters is what he has to say now. And for me when truly listening to him, I can't other then share some tears cause the teachings he are giving are so simple and pure, yet so hard to take to heart. And in many interviews I've seen with him I can almost see his heartache of not being able to just give the person he is speaking to his view without trying to use words, cause in history we can see that when a master tell words it can lead to 2 things, a few liberated or followers of a righteous path , then a few who get hubris and false-enlightenment and who soon see how they can control people and by so turning the devotion of laypeople into a weapon against themselves...

Anyway, he is no saint, he is as much you and me, as he is Gandhi and Gaddafi, The difference is his choices and priorities, the road he is walking.

So after this wall of text for a small subject, all I can say is I agree.
I do believe in afterlife though, my NDE kind of make me have to. I dont believe We will survive, but I believe the essence of what is Us will survive.
When I was "beyond", I could still see "my" body. But I fell nothing for it, it was like 2% of everything, and the other 98% felt so much more familiar.

Well, as soon as I returned here it all escaped me like a dream, but the memories are still there, and those I will never forget, even though they may transform during every time I try to remember I hope to keep the essence of the unexplainable.
So I am sure consciousness lives on, but our ego dies, so it all depends on how much you have released yourself from your ego before death, which in my case (obviously after all this text) isn't very much at all...


(sigh, I'm someone who say I try to follow a Zen way, and this is how much I write to answer a simple statement?? :P)

You can believe whatever you what to believe but there is one thing you are missing here. Believe system and what we really know have totally different meanings:

Believe system is when you don’t know by personal experience. That means your beliefs are based on words, scriptures or lack of evidence. You apply there words or scriptures to yourself because they appeal to you.

Knowing is: when you know who you really are from your own personal experiences.

Originally Posted by Quester

You can believe whatever you what to believe but there is one thing you are missing here. Believe system and what we really know have totally different meanings:

Believe system is when you don’t know by personal experience. That means your beliefs are based on words, scriptures or lack of evidence. You apply there words or scriptures to yourself because they appeal to you.

Knowing is: when you know who you really are from your own personal experiences.

"You can believe whatever you what to believe but there is one thing you are missing here." I prefer to say "You can believe (or have faith) in anything you wish but that won't change actuality."

Belief systems (faiths) are usually missing one major component as you indicate above - evidence of what they teach. I'd say one often adopts such teachings because of the conditioning experienced from being children - all the way from primary/elementary education and mostly mainstream religions.

The outcome is that often that we follow because it means we fit in and the alternative is seeking something else..... And life usually brings its own pressures which don't make searching an easy option.

Those with some idea about life, death and so-called life hereafter are very privileged that they escaped from their conditioning.