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Is man even a spiritual being?

Feral

Rogue male
I'm not heavily opinionated on this right now, which is remarkable given my 26 years in Scientology, but I have been wondering and unfortunately the conclusion that I've come to is that I spent 26 years following a guru that didn't know nearly as much as he claimed and thus my basis of "wisdom", following him, was fatally flawed.

Now I'm in the normal but uncomfortable position where I just don't know the answers.

There are several things, a hatfull I guess, that I still accept from Scientology. One was the concept of SURVIVE. Man, and all life seeks to survive. Seems true to me.

Man also has a really big brain and an incredible gift for creative imagination.

So now I'm buggered. What if all our glorious history of religion and spiritual belief was no more than a product from a lucky combination of man's desire to survive coupled with his keen creative imagination?

I've sought the *truth* as a teenager and that led me to Scientology which sadly for me and my quest was no better than any other belief, ology or ism.

It failed so profoundly when it came to the acid test that it simply disproves itself on too many fronts to count.

Either we are the product of protoplasm or the truth of our spiritual nature will be beyond us while we languish on this physical plane. Something that will be revealed when we leave this playing field.

Now what I suspect is that if real at all then all religion and spiritualism can only be a matter of subjective truth and that definitely includes Scientology, only the Scientologist refers to their faith as "certainty" and "knowingness".

I'm sure I'm not the only ex musing over this at this time, so I was keen to see what other viewpoints were among my friends here on this subject.
 

SomeGuy

Patron Meritorious
I was once tortured by the unknown.

Many years ago I came to peace with my self by adopting a rather simple philosophy.

If god can't take a joke then fuck him.

I have not thought about the mysteries of the human existence beyond that in many a moon.

I like that there are unknowns, that life is a great adventure some of extremely difficult, some of it joyous. I don't attribute it to any great mystery beyond chaotic order. I just let it happen and control what I can and let go of what I can't.

My take on is man a spiritual being.
 

smartone

My Own Boss
The simple answer is... I don't know.

I have never recalled any of my past lives.

I have no idea what happens when I die because I've had no PROOF! :confused2:
 

EP - Ethics Particle

Gold Meritorious Patron
Kevin my friend - I haven't the foggiest notion what we humans are, and that's a fact.

So a story comes to mind about the drunk who staggers out of the bar and stumbles over another drunk laying in the gutter.

The first one in the gutter says: "I'm too far gone to get meself up and outta this gutter...can you help get me up and out?"

The last one in lays there and thinks for a little bit and says: "No son, I'm too far gone meself...but tell ya what, I'll just lay here and keep you company...would that help?"

So whatever the deal is, I'm in it with you my friend - and that includes the whole kit and kaboodle of yez! :melodramatic:

EP, Mike Horton
 

Terril park

Sponsor
I'm not heavily opinionated on this right now, which is remarkable given my 26 years in Scientology, but I have been wondering and unfortunately the conclusion that I've come to is that I spent 26 years following a guru that didn't know nearly as much as he claimed and thus my basis of "wisdom", following him, was fatally flawed.

Now I'm in the normal but uncomfortable position where I just don't know the answers.

There are several things, a hatfull I guess, that I still accept from Scientology. One was the concept of SURVIVE. Man, and all life seeks to survive. Seems true to me.

Man also has a really big brain and an incredible gift for creative imagination.

So now I'm buggered. What if all our glorious history of religion and spiritual belief was no more than a product from a lucky combination of man's desire to survive coupled with his keen creative imagination?

I've sought the *truth* as a teenager and that led me to Scientology which sadly for me and my quest was no better than any other belief, ology or ism.

It failed so profoundly when it came to the acid test that it simply disproves itself on too many fronts to count.

Either we are the product of protoplasm or the truth of our spiritual nature will be beyond us while we languish on this physical plane. Something that will be revealed when we leave this playing field.

Now what I suspect is that if real at all then all religion and spiritualism can only be a matter of subjective truth and that definitely includes Scientology, only the Scientologist refers to their faith as "certainty" and "knowingness".

I'm sure I'm not the only ex musing over this at this time, so I was keen to see what other viewpoints were among my friends here on this subject.

The key thing....Is there anything better re the philosophy.
 

Jachs

Gold Meritorious Patron
Man maybe , may not be .

The word IS has a very bad reputation for causing a great many wars and violence.

IS and Certainty*. Hubbards stars at the buffet

Try omitting it 4 a week

*waiver-absolutes are unobtainable
 

Opter

Silver Meritorious Patron
F Now what I suspect is that if real at all then all religion and spiritualism can only be a matter of subjective truth and that definitely includes Scientology said:
I fully agree with your statement that religion and spiritualism can only be a subjective truth. For instance, I met a lovely family with seven beautiful children in a public place. I told the father that I thought his family was beautiful and we started talking.Soon after we started our conversation he told me ,in a convincing manner ( not in a pushy way. He just wanted me to know his truth )
that god created everything and sent his son Jesus to atone for/take man's sins and Jesus put us on this earth with love and man should love each other and so on.

He KNEW that that was/is the only TRUTH


Opter



He knows that this is TRUE
 

Moonchild

Patron with Honors
I'm not heavily opinionated on this right now, which is remarkable given my 26 years in Scientology, but I have been wondering and unfortunately the conclusion that I've come to is that I spent 26 years following a guru that didn't know nearly as much as he claimed and thus my basis of "wisdom", following him, was fatally flawed.

Now I'm in the normal but uncomfortable position where I just don't know the answers.

There are several things, a hatfull I guess, that I still accept from Scientology. One was the concept of SURVIVE. Man, and all life seeks to survive. Seems true to me.

Man also has a really big brain and an incredible gift for creative imagination.

So now I'm buggered. What if all our glorious history of religion and spiritual belief was no more than a product from a lucky combination of man's desire to survive coupled with his keen creative imagination?

I've sought the *truth* as a teenager and that led me to Scientology which sadly for me and my quest was no better than any other belief, ology or ism.

It failed so profoundly when it came to the acid test that it simply disproves itself on too many fronts to count.

Either we are the product of protoplasm or the truth of our spiritual nature will be beyond us while we languish on this physical plane. Something that will be revealed when we leave this playing field.

Now what I suspect is that if real at all then all religion and spiritualism can only be a matter of subjective truth and that definitely includes Scientology, only the Scientologist refers to their faith as "certainty" and "knowingness".

I'm sure I'm not the only ex musing over this at this time, so I was keen to see what other viewpoints were among my friends here on this subject.


Welcome to the club Old Son....welcome to the club.

As you quite rightly observe, Man has an incredible capacity for creative imagination; couple that with an evolved-in craving for survival despite the obvious inevitability of the grave and what do you get?

It's a hard and cruel thing to contemplate: that our sundry, colourful and sometimes fantastical notions about 'spiritual survival and destiny' may be nothing more than the machinations of a self-aware mind, bent on survival, trying to find ways to 'make it so'.

I hope that isn't the case, but the older I get the more I'm compelled to that view, at least as a distinct possibility.
 
"Spiritual Being" has two important aspects according to my own way of thinking.
One is the meaning "intangible". I think being the identit(ies) I consider myself to be.....that's all intangible. It all happens in thought. Anything, including physical and mental, can be associated with my sense of identity and self. It is all intangible because even the physical things are interpreted as identity or self components, aspects, attributes. So In that sense I have an idea which is similar to "spiritual"
but intangible is a much less loaded word.

Which brings me to the second aspect. "Spiritual" always has baggage with it.
Such as ideas of continuance after physical death, ideas that a person functions at least partially separately from the things that make up the whole person. An extreme example is the scientology thetan vs MEST and thetan vs mind BS.

Even without that strong scientology type separation, there is still some separation AFAICS, with people who want to use the word "spiritual" to define thenselves. It is more or less alway used positively. It always affirms something good - fair enough, but the "something good" always implies, to some degree, an escape from the terrible facts of life for humans. We are the same species as the Norwegian maniac that killed those people yesterday, and the Nazis and those old fuckers on trial for Serbian genocide. So they are "spiritual" beings too. Whoopee. So are their victims. Whoopee. So are the victims of natural disasters. They should stamp "spiritual" being on all the foreheads of all the victims of natural and unnatural disasters.

OTOH, music, and certain sights, places, etc, can make me feel so good that just saying "I feel really intangible right now" doesn't seem to cut it....although, I have to say, sometimes feeling intagible or feeling like nothing has an amazing sense to it too.

I think it all goes together. Feeling "spiritual" is worth pulling apart and thinking about, because it is loaded, there are cult-ural messages with it that if we feel that way we are free of the shit show of life. It's like being drunk. You wake up in the morning and..........(put in the crap things about being human that have not been permanently removed from your hard drive.) We can sit and think about it while we have our cappachino. A lot of people are just looking for their next dirty drink of water. Well, whatever....
 

thefatman

Patron with Honors
If man is, all other animals are. Just because we have speech and can reason doesn't mean we're any more special than anything else.

But spiritual, I'd say no. Everything about our personality, character, likes, dislikes, traits, behaviors, fetishes, friendships, and so on rely entirely on a working, function, live brain. Spirituality (at least in the mainstream religious sense) requires there to be some kind of backup file that just instantly kicks in the second we die, seems a bit fishy to me.

All religious groups claim they know the ultimate, unquestionable truth, even within a single religion, different groups act as if the others are wrong some even go as far as saying they aren't even real adherents to the religion (e.g., "Oh, X group isn't a real Christian"). Also, if there is a supposedly infallible, all-knowing, omnipotent God/god why does he allow evil to exist?
 

Free to shine

Shiny & Free
Funny enough, I had a conversation about this subject last night.

After a decade or so of examining other beliefs and ideas it seems to come back to "I don't know what I don't know." And therefore I for one am left to deal with life on a daily basis, as it is.

I will never ever accept any kind of 'truth" or certainty from anyone else. I feel we all need to find our own concepts of spirituality and live them as best we can. Some of my own experiences have led me to feel that there is a 'oneness' that somehow connects us all and maybe, perhaps, we are spiritual beings with a body. But not the way scientology views it, not at all. After my decades of unquestioningly accepting what I was told, it has been an interesting journey.

I have had many events that are not easily explained by natural physical laws and I accept them and experience them and digest what I learn. I have been able to do things on a mental level that still amaze me and reinforces the idea that we do influence our daily lives in ways we are probably not usually aware of. Does that make us a spiritual being? Dunno. :)

Meantime life ticks on, and it's something worth LIVING. Scientology is all about the future and it's promised possibilities and I wasted a long time doing that.
 

Moonchild

Patron with Honors
There's also the possibility of 'collective unconsciousness' - a kind of ocean of subliminal awareness into which we can each dip our toes.

Exactly how this would work, I don't know. While we plod around this world, is there the possibility of some kind of matrix of interlinked energy created by each and all of us by whatever 'super-subtle' means?

I've experienced a few things in life that seem to suggest that this may be the case; so have quite a few others I believe.

If this be true, then what is its nature? What form does this energy take? It's a question that can't be adequately answered. And then, once again...yet again, off we go down the road of speculation...which inevitably means nothing more than the expression of personal subjective opinion according to experience.

If there IS such a thing as this 'collective unconsciousness', does that necessarily demonstrate the existence of 'spirituality' as something distinct from life in the physical realm? Again, it's a question that can't be answered really; I point to it as an example of a phenomenon that may be, by its as yet undiscovered nature, a feature of life in the physical universe, but misinterpreted as something beyond and separate for the precise reason that it cannot, at this time, be accurately appreciated.

There's clearly no end to this kind of speculation; perhaps the best that can be said might be this:-

If there's a saving grace to modern, 2011 'homo sapiens' it may be that at length and at last he's able to admit that there are, for the time being anyway, certain things that he simply CANNOT know; and that said, perhaps assume the wisdom to demur from insisting on baseless assumptions that more properly belong to the primal races of the Stone Age.
 
The simple answer is... I don't know.

I have never recalled any of my past lives.

I have no idea what happens when I die because I've had no PROOF! :confused2:
And neither does anyone else ... end of story.

Unless you have too much time on your hands there is no point in taking it any further since you won't be any further along in finding out than when you started.
 

Moonchild

Patron with Honors
And neither does anyone else ... end of story.

Unless you have too much time on your hands there is no point in taking it any further since you won't be any further along in finding out than when you started.



That's quite true; but.....it's occasionally a nice little 'work-out' for the little grey cells? What harm? Unless you become attached to a 'guru' who pretends to have the 'answers' that is....
 

Hypnotarian

Patron with Honors
I'm not heavily opinionated on this right now, which is remarkable given my 26 years in Scientology, but I have been wondering and unfortunately the conclusion that I've come to is that I spent 26 years following a guru that didn't know nearly as much as he claimed and thus my basis of "wisdom", following him, was fatally flawed.
.

Just watch this -- BTW whoever put the music on this video sucks -- however, the content is worth the attention and consideration with regards to it's relevance of your questioning.

Fuck the distracting music, stick with it and listen to the speaking and argumentation for a minute. BTW I'm not saying I believe these claims dogmatically but I'm willing to consider them and live the question and uncertainty.

http://youtu.be/4RoGtWUMi4w

If you want the full ("unscored") version go here:

http://youtu.be/hDzRi9dQKig
 
That's quite true; but.....it's occasionally a nice little 'work-out' for the little grey cells? What harm? Unless you become attached to a 'guru' who pretends to have the 'answers' that is....

Nothing wrong with discussing it as long as the people discussing it realize it's abstract fiction. the problems start when people believe the fiction and start strapping on bombs and running into crowds or starting wars in the name of their brand of man made 'spirituality'
 

Hypnotarian

Patron with Honors
This is the Wiki entry for the simulation argument that Harris was mentioning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom

I'd say it's possible that the question should be "Is man an analog or digital being?'.

Or I haven't word cleared those terms fully so the question might not make sense.

Like I say, " I'm smart and stupid, nice and mean, right and wrong, and everything in-between."

I do my best.
 
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