I've been loving this thread. I've been telling myself to absorb it. I've been telling myself to practise patience and not rush to contribute. I managed to get half way, and gave up waiting. I hope I'm not intruding too much on the flow, as things are likely to have moved on a bit. I don't want to lose my own mental thread.
I began to wake up from the reductionistic delusion of science a long time ago. I dropped out of a geology degree because I realised everyone else round me was putting the world in conceptual boxes and committing their life to disecting them further, rearranging them and reaffirming their reality to each other. One kind of rock has these properties - another kind of rock has these, different properties - oh, and if you stick around long enough, somewhere it says that they are considered different rocks and given different names because their chemical composition is one side or another of an arbitrary line in the sand.
Everywhere, the same thing; another example from a biology lecture: species are defined by their inability to mate with other species - except that occasionally they do, or occasionally there are 'ring-species' where a population can mate with its near neighbours who can mate with some other near neighbours, but the more dispersed populations can't mate.
And fundamentally, in a lecure about using statistics in science, the penny dropped. The whole of science is based on degrees of confidence, not proof. There's the deceptive idea of 'statistical significance', which until then I always thought of as philosophically pure, rigorous. Someone must have worked out a fool-proof method of deciding what is significant, I assumed, and statistical analysis allows us to put the findings of our experiments on one side of the line or the other, equating to scientific proof. What amazed me was how reluctant lecturers were to acknowledge the falsity of that, and I never really bothered to dig into it myself. I had an intuitive grasp of the falsity of it from one lecture, and quit.
I am fairly confident, however, that I am right in saying that significance is not something given in nature or discovered in any absolute sense by mathematics. We simply decide how much doubt we're prepared to ignore, and then, if we are really bad philosophers, we call a hypothesis proven. Please let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree here. This was the first and final nail in the kind of faith I had in science that MrsCogan seems still to enjoy. In the intervening years I have learned that science is a faith, a religion, a fact that most scientists will get all steamed up refuting. It is hard to deny that science is a very useful method and has brought wonderful human abilities, but there is a difference between science and the search for truth, philosophy.
So I've been steadily chucking out any assumptions I discover I'm clinging on to. On the other hand, I'm not prepared to take on LoA and IM because people say it works for them, but I am prepared to accept the possibility that it does. MrsC reminds us of the danger of magical thinking, but is not philosophical about the possibility that the world might just possibly work magically. She uses the term 'wishful thinking' as if it contained an intrinsic, undeniable refutation of itself, whereas a philosopher would recognise that error of logic (in other words, that may be exactly what it is!).
I have two main difficulties with LoA-IM (and I'm sorry I still haven't investigated their original description if that is significant). They are difficult to explain. The first is something to do with the idea of subjective reality, or the unified field, or Oneness, and my problem is to do with the morality (or just the wisdom, if you prefer) of the small self or ego imagining that it is creating realities via its (imaginary) thoughts. As I posted in another thread, the spiritual tradition we are talking about is so old that it has been called the Perennial Philosophy, and the warning features very highly amongst its greatest minds not to be self-centred and wish for things. The Buddha warned against desire and considered it
the source of all suffering. It would seem that IM is a developed or 'supernatural' [edited] power, according to those teachers, but one that is not there for us to suck goodies out of thin air with, congratulate ourselves on having achieved, or brag about.
If thoughts create reality, rather than thinking, oh good I can be rich, perhaps we could think, oh **** I'm too rich already (as Jesus might have told most of us). The opinion of some IMers is that reluctance to experiment or embrace the idea of attracting abundance to ourselves comes from a kind of pathological refusal to let ourselves have good things. I am just pointing out the possibility that it may also arise from a different understanding of subjective reality and the nature of the self. If we see through the illusion of the separate self that can acquire things, there is no sense in purposely intending wealth. One might argue that there is if it is to do good work with, to spread the word, or to give away again, but there are many teachers who would disagree, and I find the argument suspiciously convenient. [Edit - now that I've read a bit more, I see others are saying similar things]
It is strange, however, how the two ends of my self-argument on this can merge. If I am God (pardon the short-hand message here), I do not need anything, so to make myself rich or anything else is nonsense [edited]. But if I am God, there is nothing I cannot manifesat for myself and no sin or error to be committed. I'm just a little scared the way some folks round here seem to be ahead of themselves. I keep trying to choose gratitude and selflessness (I accept that I'm no saint, however!). I don't mean to suggest that other decisions are wrong.
One other thing that's been burning at me, which relates to this perhaps, but might deserve a new thread, is the presupposition in IM-LoA that you have free will to decide what to think and manifest. Acting like Godot said:
Quote:
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At a rather mundane level, we say that "thought affects reality", in the sense we can, for example, cause our hands or feet to move, just by thinking about it or deciding to do it. At this level, the proposition is uncontroversial and I discuss it no further.
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Uncontroversial? My personal meditations suggest to me that this might be an illusion, and I also came across mention of an experiment which seemed to show that when we intend to move a muscle, there is activity in the brain, the beginnings of the process that results in movement, before we are aware even of the intention (although, perhaps there is an error caused by the fact that subjects have to also report the moment when they are intending to move). Given my trust of science, the jury is out, of course, but I wondered what people make of that. However, put in context of Oneness, maybe it still makes no sense to talk about intention of the self. 'There isn't one (“Why are we unhappy? -- Because 99.9% of everything you think, and everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn’t one.” Wei Wu Wei, quoted on
Introduction --- Thanks for that, Jasper Solomon). Whew!
xxxj