Spirit of Approaching Truth
“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Mat 22:38-39.
I wonder if there may not be a third great commandment which is also like the first. Its perfection would come with following, not leading: love truth.
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You try to be succinct, but end up being ambiguous. How often do we wake up with this realization?
Not often, I think, but this morning . . . For those who found this post confusing, please see Hayden's comment on the discussion thread and my reply. Verily, I command it unto ye, lol, because it looks like it's just semantics. Thanks, Hayden, for the opportunity to clarify. 12-07
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I’m out straight with other things and have been unable to spend much time blogging this last week; it could go on like this for at least another week, but I do plan to at least keep putting up new posts . . .
I wonder if there may not be a third great commandment which is also like the first. Its perfection would come with following, not leading: love truth.
______
You try to be succinct, but end up being ambiguous. How often do we wake up with this realization?
Not often, I think, but this morning . . . For those who found this post confusing, please see Hayden's comment on the discussion thread and my reply. Verily, I command it unto ye, lol, because it looks like it's just semantics. Thanks, Hayden, for the opportunity to clarify. 12-07
______
I’m out straight with other things and have been unable to spend much time blogging this last week; it could go on like this for at least another week, but I do plan to at least keep putting up new posts . . .
Posted by Paul at 9:48 AM Permalink
18 Comments:
I like those bible scriptures showing how important love is. I love the scripture Matthew 5:8 where it reads:
"Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God."
Happy Holidays Paul (((Hugs)))
Firstly how you can wonder if there is a third commandment? Do you mean that you would like to create another commandment? That people must obey because you command it?
I don't understand at all "its perfection would come with following, not leading". I don't understand what the words mean either separately or in combination.
"Love truth". I have no idea what that can possibly mean, as a commandment.
Obviously I know what a commandment is, for I am familiar with the Bible, and I understand it as an historical documented fact.
I can understand myself having a love of truth---for example feeling bad if I tell a lie, feeling good if I am true to myself and true to the literal truth of language.
But I cannot understand it in your context of someone commanding me to do this.
To love truth I'm thinking of as loving what feels real and comes from that same place, because what we perceive is only our reconstruction of what is out there but sometimes it's possible to really get through that I think.
By "following not leading", do you mean following truth where you find it and not trying to impose something which you have decided is true onto other people? rather than following someone who has decided what they think the truth is???
PS Good luck with the other things.
I think the following excerpt from the recent post on my blog may seem to relate to this.
“One can not capture this principle by the normal faculties of knowing. None is able to convey its nature properly and it is futile to listen to lecturing by others. It can not be grasped even by intently listening to the whisperings of the phenomena happening around and analyzing them by rational thinking. Its visitations are spontaneous and it descends on those it courts as a vehicle for expressing itself. Intense longing with the attitude to give oneself as an instrument of divinity alone can attract this essence of divinity to one’s being.
It will not descend on those who dissipate themselves in futile pursuits. It will not come to those who have not found peace through integrity. It will not visit the minds turbulent with anxieties and apprehensions. It can not be attained through empirical studies.”
You shall blindly obey the Church with all of your will, and with all of your soul, and with all of your money.
To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men..
"We want the truth?
We can't HANDLE the truth!"
VINCENT: Oh, you know me better than that. And if I ever do try to deliver a commandment over this blog, please, everyone, ignore me! Senior moments are one thing, but Moses moments would be quite another and I don’t want anyone hauling me away just yet, lol…
Seriously, maybe it's just me, but haven't you ever felt like elaborating on scripture? To me, it's part of bringing one's own heart and mind to it, the way I think everyone does anyway. At the least, people, both as individuals and churches, emphasize/downplay passages that particularly resonate with them or don't.
So that's all I'm doing here. The "commandment" format follows because that's how those passages read.
HAZZBUZZ: People do seem to view themselves as not religious if they don't go to church. But I've also known people who strike me as not really so religious even though they go to church very regularly.
On following not leading, that's basically what I mean. Seems to me that when truth is seen as static, something that you already have a complete grasp of, then it's a hindrance to learning.
In the political sphere, the "neocons" in the US administration strike me as a good example of people who are truly handicapped in this regard. Their "unwavering resolve", "determination" etc. – they seem to utilize a whole lexicon of "firm" and "steadfast" phraseology - has misled the nation into repeated reality-collisions.
AVGW: I find the contemplative or "mystical" (misleading term, imo) aspect of religion meaningful too. People don't always put the same sort of interpretations on such experiences, so there's the question of distinguishing the experiences themselves from the interpretations we place on them.
HOMOESCAPEONS: Not the whole story, but certainly part of it.
sorry I suppose I should have clarified..
the fact that these 'commandments' are all ideas that somebody created should allow anyone theopportunity to change, add or subtract from them as they wish.
Tonight the film The Pagan Christ based on Tom Harpur's book, explores the possibility that Jesus could have literally been a metaphorical embodiment of mythological characters plagarised from Egypt and other ancient religions. As far as historical evidence stands it is sketchy and inconclusive at best...regardless of how hard the Church Fathers brutally enforced it's authenticity and legitimacy throughout the last two millenia.
Harpur said that "Christianity made a rather fateful error in the early centuries of it's life in which it took the message which it had and literalized it."
Now you may regard my view as tedious and but the Gospels are faith documents and not historical..and oddly enough Harpur views this authentic deconstruction of a literal Christ actually builds up the divinity of the metaphorical Christ.
Either way it is important to remember that the historical aspects of all Religions are problematic and deconstructive so concentrating on the Faith aspect, as you do so well, is the key to spirituality.
Hitchens recently wrote a marvelous piece about Hanukah and how the Epicureans were making inroads in the Jewish Community 150 years BC..this promotion of Greek rational thought "presented the world with the triumph of rational thought"...until the Maccabean revolt and the old time religion came back and took over and accidentally gave rise to christianity. (www.slate.com)
When you or I quote Mathew or any other text, we cannot assume that these are literal instructions from a literal creator.
Therefore in my roundabout way if we loved the TRUTH there would be little reason to quote Mathew if your sense of authenticity based upon actual evidence was centered on empirical knowledge.
So that is why I said we can't handle the truth-truth but we can talk about the idea of truth.
*falls to the floor and starts rocking back and forth..btw I'm having a birthday party c'mon over and have some punch..
This post has been selected to be featured on the OneWord blog at:
http://1word.wordpress.com/uwords/
The scientists also have to grapple with this dilemma when they discover that the accuracy in the measurement of position of a particle is at the expense of the accuracy in the measurement of its velocity. Science learns to live with this limitation and flourish.
Flourishing by disciplined acceptance of limitations is a common phenomenon. A very common example of this is the limited companies incorporated on the premise of limited liability, which made the explosion of commercial activities possible.
Sometimes I feel that religions are limited companies in the field of spirituality where the access to truth is limited. But then, like the commercial companies they also contribute to the flourishing of spiritual activities.
Religion becomes poisonous when it uses the uncertainty to disown truth. The same thing happens with a commercial company that uses the limited liability concept to robe the share market.
When you stop trying to read it that way, it opens the door to chaos – from a fundamentalist perspective – but, imo, to more intelligent interpretations and discussions of the text. And people can quote the text without having a literalist view of it and while disliking religion at its worst and most hypocritical as much as you clearly do. Every time you cite that kind of thing, I’m just nodding my head, and so do millions of other people who understand themselves as spiritual or religious.
You can even quote passages because they articulate things you’ve experienced first hand instead of as external sources of authority. For example, I think you'd appreciate the many passages that have Jesus speaking against hypocrisy and public displays of piety and prayerfulness.
As far as Jesus goes, I’ve been out of divinity school a long time, but unless things have changed a lot, the weight of scholarly opinion falls on the side that he was most likely a real historical person despite the fact that, just as you say, we get to read about him exclusively through a faith document.
On learning as not static, I think Mark puts it well in his comment above with regard to learning in the spiritual area.
Happy Birthday – must be on your blog? Shoot, it will be a back post by the time I get there; it’s been a rough week and a half with no let up in sight yet…
MARK W, I think you’ve said it better than I did. Thanks for the link, I’ve noted your blogs and will stop by first chance I get.
AVGW: That’s true – interpretation vs. experience isn’t always a clear cut distinction, although sometimes it is. “Poisonous” sounds good to me as an adjective to describe religion gone wrong. As you say, when that happens, it disowns truth – or distorts it… or spells it with a capital T, supposing itself to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth, giving it justification to impose its Truth on others. Which, being impossible, ought to be a clue to those who practice it that maybe zealotry of this kind in fact falls far short of grasping the whole truth.
Seems to me there are way too many people following already, and way too many "truths."
Those who follow with religious passion are particularly dangerous.
I encourage all to "seek truth." It seems far more beneficial and less risky for those around them.
Not at all what I meant.
See Mark W's comment, he "followed" my intended meaning - and stated it better!
By following truth, I meant the opposite of presuming to know truth with a capital T - as per my reply to AVGW's second comment above (in my comments prior to this one.)
I think your clarification is the crux of the matter because what disturbed me at first was the notion that truth was a fruit growing on a clearly-labelled truth-tree and that one was commanded to like its taste.
To pursue truth is a different kind of activity, I suppose. I can imagine trying to find this truth-tree in the forests of the world, and then finding it bitter, making it difficult to love it.
For example, suppose someone's pursuit of truth results in the loss of belief in God's omnipotence. That will taste bitter initially to the person who is used to a more sugary idea. The commandment might not make any sense then, except in a bullying sense. "Eat your fruit!"
Forgive me Paul, please. This is all about "succinct/ambiguous". But that's the territory when you are writing a commandment. Murphy's Law applies. "If it can be misunderstood, it will be."
Also, I think I need to make a rubber bracelet with the first two laws on it. I don't think about those often enough.
2A. Don't hurt yourself.
2B. Don't hurt anyone else.
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