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Originally Posted by moonrambler  This is exactly the attitude that got me into the financial mess which I'm now digging myself out of.
It's taken a LOT of self-examination and effort to understand that most people who want money are not greedy swines.
Also, where do you get the idea that $$$ is unavailable to people who are trying to manifest it? My monthly income has gone up 40% since I started working with the concepts on this particular forum. |
Ok, yeah, I don't know what came over me then. Well, I do, it was all the old crap coming back, all the religious stuff saying that the love of money is the root of all evil (Jesus) and crap like that, if it is crap, which I don't know.
Actually, what do I believe when I stop repeating things I've heard? It's a tool, like cylon says. Sorry for getting on my high horse, like I even give much to charity for that matter.
I'm sure you're all sick of hearing what I think, but anyway, I'm reassessing all this Oneness or two-ness stuff as well.
There's an odd thing that happens. Wilber demonstrated it in that quote earlier, with the Auschwitz Test. The general argument goes like this: 'A' can't possibly be true, because if A were true it would be really really horrible to think. I don't believe that we create our reality, so I'm not saying that the victims did, but when Wilber says that it would be 'unconscionable' and 'untenable', he just means that he finds the idea repugnant. That, to me, is a pathetic excuse for an argument, and quite beneath a man of his supposed intelligence. We might be horrified to think about the possibility that people could cause their own downfall in dreadful circumstances, and we might look at their lives and recognise them as good, loving people who did not expect or intend to be murdered, but who knows what hidden lines of causation might be in play. Wilber is quite open to Buddhist ideas of karma acting across many lives, which would suggest at least the possibility that the victims were all brought together in that life at that time so as to fulfill their karmic suffering. I'm not saying that, but I don't believe in reincarnation: he does. It is just cowardice to reject propositions on the grounds that you're scared to think about them, or you might be accused, wrongly, of being racist or genocidal. It's as useful as arguing with a satanist that his religion can't be correct because it's very nasty...or an atheistic philosophy that says everything in the world happens through competition and violence, nature red in tooth and claw. If the world worked that way, finding it repugnant isn't going to change it.
A similar kind of argument comes a lot from the East. I don't mean to be racist either, but it seems a peculiarity of Indian thinking from what I've read. The teacher gives a surprising assertion about reality, for example that we have many lives and the soul goes on into another body at death. Then he pretends to ask himself why that should be so, and answers that it must be so, because how awful would it be if it were not? The soul just exterminated like that into nothingness? The very idea! - usually this is where he repeats the assertion - "No, the soul is not destroyed, but goes on to another body!" Smiles all round. Someone rub a bit more butter on the old git eh?
But spiritual philosophy is full of ridiculous arguments like that. In Life After Death, Deepak Chopra argues that you were never born - in the sense of never coming into existence as a conscious being from a state of not being. How do you know? Well, think about it, he says. Can you remember a time when you were not aware? To which the obvious answer is, "No, Deepak, I cannot remember ever being unaware". There you are, then, says the great spiritual teacher, that means that you never were born, you have existed for all time, adding as a neat flourish before the penny has time to drop,
And if you never began, that means you can never die either.
Can I remember being asleep? No. So am I always awake, Deepak, and will I never fall asleep again? It's bloody insidious this monstrous excuse for spiritual intellectual argument. And I haven't found a spiritual teacher yet who wasn't full of it - assumption and false reasoning after prejudice and projection! Not even my old beloved Ram Dass. They're all full of it!
Infinitethoughts just posed a similar one, that if you ask where a thought comes from and where it goes to: 'You'll see that it comes and goes from your "infiniteness" (for lack of a better word.)' With all due respect, the lack of a better word is not sufficient reason to conjour the words 'your infiniteness' out of thin air. Could you give me any idea, infinitethoughts, why we should consider that possibility over 'bio-chemical emergency' (meaning that my bodymind found biological reasons for constructing a thought due to the particular circumstances in which it found itself, for the purposes of trying to navigate itself through the next ten minutes the best way it could)?