Sensei

It has long been my belief that the universe, and everything in it (animate or not) consists of energy. Even the air and space around us. I feel it is this energy field which some call God. By praying/meditating one can learn to manipulate this energy in small ways.

Call it what you will; God, ki, chi, ect. It's still rock-n-roll to me. Naming somthing doesn't make things better. On the contrary, it confines and resticts it.

I look forward to reading your thoughts.

roshan

i believe that there is only one absolute reality, and that the world is illusory.

and i agree - giving something a name or a form restricts it. thats why hindus have hundreds of names for god.

Sensei

Roshan,

By saying that hindus have hundereds of names for god, are you saying they, thus, avoid the restrictions caused by giving a name, or that they multiply it a hundered times!

roshan

actually we have more than hundreds.. i think it should be in the millions probably.

we dont believe in restricting god with any single name, and we believe that god is god no matter what you call it, so for hindus, we believe that god can be called by anything you want.

victorialis

Embodying/anthropomorphising an unknown force or principle into a deity is just a convenience. It makes that force/principle easier to use for organizing social behavior. In monotheism, the deity functions as supreme tribal elder: the authority, the strongman -- the one who will "get you" if you don't act right. In polytheism, a deity serves as a "department head" (e.g., if you want rain, pray to the weather god).

If social order is the top priority, this approach makes sense.

But once social order is established and more or less equilibrated, humans begin mooting other uses for this unknown ultimate force/principle.

Who said, "God is a way to measure pain"? Was it John Lennon? It was somebody from the 20thC, wasn't it? Anyway, I thought the statement represented a novel approach because of its barefaced instrumentality. No pretense at complicated moral considerations; just a raw existential issue. "God is a way to measure pain" has the virtue of simplicity. It's also a completely negative definition, allowing no positive uses for a god-concept. Only comfort -- from pain -- or justification for it.

Observing some religious people, I sometimes think the god-concept is no more than a way to claim and wield more natural authority than one otherwise would. It's a way to "big up"... for any purpose imaginable.

Once we stop anthropomorphising this universal force we've proposed, we're freed to think of it in other ways. But it is still a very human, instrumental concept. If we didn't think we could use it somehow, would it interest us?

Some are interested not so much in using this force/principle as in simply interacting directly with it. That seems OK, I don't see why not, if you want to.

I like the ideas Sensei has laid out. They are not unfamiliar or counterintuitive. I suggest that to look at god-concepts in new ways, we have to look also at our concepts surrounding the idea of power. The two ideas are inseparable to us.

Power is a touchy subject. That's why it's convenient to assign ultimate power to a god/gods: applied fairly, it (usually) puts power outside all of us, equally.

Substituting energy for god relieves the "universal force" concept of some nasty baggage. But we still have to face the moral issues of what to do with the power we've associated with the energy. What connotation does "energy" have outside the idea of power? What denotations?

If, for example, we accept the idea of ki, and if we don't intend to change or modify our relationship to ki, why would we hold such a concept to begin with? We would just float, incurious, in ki.

"Not-naming" only avoids the moral issues of power. It does not confine or restrict the thing we are naming.

It confines and restricts us, the namers.

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: victorialis ]</p>