Okay, so what is this site about, anyway?
As I said in my initial post, which I have preserved as the page called “I of my own knowledge,” our civilization is dying because it has lost contact with reality. What you have been told, you may believe. What you have experienced, you will know. There is all the difference in the world between belief and experience. Belief is secondhand knowledge, and can never match experience, which is knowledge at first hand.
Neither we nor the universe around us are what our decaying civilization assumes us to be. We are not orphans. We are not machines. The universe is not a wilderness of dead matter. Life is not accidental, is not meaningless, does not end with physical death. Anyone who tells you otherwise does not know what he is talking about. You have the ability to learn these things firsthand.
Reductionism, materialism, atheism — these are the product of nightmares. They are the result of a long detour that Western civilization has taken in reaction against the age of faith. It was perhaps a necessary detour, but if a detour does not bring us back to the main highway, it is not an assistance but an obstruction. By the same token, the age of faith is over. Those whose revolt against materialism takes the form of a renewed devotion to old religious forms are not the way forward either. As Carl Jung once put it, the gods never return to temples they have abandoned.
Another way of saying this would be, God is continually created in the image of man, and as men change the way they think of themselves, so they must necessarily change the way they think of that which is beyond the physical. As Henry Thoreau put it, atheism itself may be comparatively popular with God.
I am not here to encourage anyone to take my word for anything. I do hope that you will give me the courtesy of assuming that I am telling the truth as best I can. But I would not want you to assume that I am correct in everything or anything that I say. I certainly don’t make that assumption. I tell you my experiences as accurately as I know how to, and my interpretations are as careful and thoughtful as I can make them, but who ever comes to The Truth?
Ultimately, there is all the difference in the world between taking someone’s word for it, and finding out for yourself. All my experience shows me that this can be done. I encourage you to find out for yourself, not to take my word and leave it at that, for if you have done that, you have done nothing.
Very nicely put. At some point, each person has to open that inner doorway and step through to experience it for themselves.
Dear Frank,
Bravo! Well said! Yes, I give you the courtesty of telling the Truth as you’ve experienced it as best you can! Oh, my friend, when you speak of finding out the truth for one’s self, I done that as best I can. A memory or thought comes up, I research it historically, the hard “concrete” stuff as well I can, then, from memory and what recorded history says match up. I thought myself crazy, but this is happened so much, I got no choice but to trust my stupid self. And a lot of the things you speak of, goning by one’s personal experience, versus what you’ve been told, are so true! You speak like the orators of old, who voices the words from his heart, yet question yourself and in doing so, ask others to do the same. You express eloquently the sentiments of my mind, perhaps, those unspoken in the minds of others as well, who seek Truth, yet fear it. People are funny. They seek, and yet they fear. “I want to know the Truth, so the Truth will set me free.” But then, they run away. Human nature confounds me. Please share with me your thoughts on this.
Take care,
Naomi