Many Paths to the Same... Question?

“It’s True for Me” Means What?

In different ways, a number of you have suggested (previous post) that when it comes to religion and spirituality, our beliefs are true for us as individuals. Certainly every belief is true to every believer in the sense that believers believe what they believe. Or if we want to use “true” as a synonym for “meaningful,” then this works too. Clearly everyone finds their religious/spiritual beliefs meaningful or they wouldn’t believe them.

I don’t think that by saying beliefs are true to believers themselves people meant to state that religious/spiritual beliefs are entirely subjective – like dreams or hallucinations. Certainly beliefs or claims of knowledge about divine matters sound like factual statements of some kind - statements concerning realities beyond the speaker’s own state of mind. Examples: we are immortal; Jesus is Lord and Savior; Mohammed is Seal of the Prophets; the law of karma, the law of attraction, heaven, hell, nirvana, cosmic consciousness…

Many Paths…

The idea of “many paths to the same Truth” is an attempt to reconcile the great variety of religious and spiritual beliefs that people hold. But it has some problems.

Many of humanity’s beliefs are incompatible and even contradictory. For example, Jesus can’t both be God (Christianity) and not-God – a completely human prophet who helped pave the way for Mohammed’s ministry (Islam). And when it comes to trying to pin down what that Truth is to which all paths lead – that’s not so easy either.

If this is because the Truth is beyond words, OK, but still… how could you know or what would convince you that whatever ineffable experience you had referenced a cosmic Truth and not a particular kind of subjective consciousness that’s peculiar to members of our own species? How would you know that you know?

To know, don’t you have to know that you know?

A commenter to the previous thread mentioned a relative who’d been to a white light and back. She writes that she herself has experienced other peoples beyond where she is.

I’ve also had experiences that fall in the “altered state of consciousness” category. One involved a sense of being accompanied by a presence and traveling to visit people around the world.

Although that’s what the experience felt like, I don’t know that I really went around the world accompanied by a mysterious presence. I don’t know how I’d tell the difference between having an experience that felt like that from one that really happened.

Did this experience feel more real and significant than a dream? Absolutely. Did this feeling of reality reveal to me that the experience was in fact real and not imaginary?

Absolutely not. I know it's possible to strongly feel that something is true or real without it being so.

More than Faith: Divine Knowledge

People sometimes consider themselves to know divine truths. They may say that they know that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, or that they see angels, know that saints intercede for us, perceive energies or auras, receive visitations from deceased loved ones that prove personal immortality…

I expect that pretty much every spiritual and religious belief that people have ever held has included a minority of adherents who go beyond saying that they believe to stating that they know.

What Do You Think?

How would you know that, say, your vivid vision of your deceased grandmother or a feeling of her presence was really a visit from beyond the grave and not a product of your memory, imagination and so forth? What would let you know – not just believe, but know – that it was real?

Do some claims of divine knowledge strike you as more credible than others? If so, what might make one claim more credible than another?

What Do You Hope For?

It seems to me that there are at least these four things that people hope for religiously or spiritually:

1. Their individual lives and the lives of loved ones

2. Our species

3. Our planet, as in “Maybe some other species will come along and do a better job with life on earth if we don’t last long.”

4. Reality or being itself – hope for the entire universe and whatever full or complete context may hold it.

1. Hope for the individual – Most westerners find this presented by their religious traditions as hope for personal immortality.

On the one hand, you hate to think of yourself and those you love being annihilated in the end. On the other, you can reach a point in life where you sincerely don’t want to be immortal. The idea of being yourself forever can seem way too long as you realize your inherent limitations.

2. Hope for our species - This might be the most widely shared item on the human hope list. Most of us want to see our species survive and thrive long term. It would appear though, that this is a universe in which all species go extinct sooner or later.

3. Hope for the planet – It’s easy to imagine a scenario where humans go extinct through human or natural causes (or some combination of the two) and some other life form takes our place to “live long and prosper” (Mr. Spock). On the one hand, this has a hopeful ring to it, kind of. On the other, humans are all dead.

4. Hope for reality or being itself – It’s hard to imagine just what this means. Language can’t do more than allude to such a possibility. I think, for example, of a phrase from the Christmas carol, “Joy to the World” that goes “and heaven and nature sing.” Or Tennyson’s reference to “that one far-off divine event to which creation moves.”

You Don’t Need Hope If You Have Certainty…

One commenter on the previous thread seemed to suggest that hope may be unnecessary or irrelevant. I’d have to guess that this commenter, like quite a lot of people, feel that they know things turn out well and that such knowledge makes hope unnecessary.

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What do you see as the biggest threats to our species in the long run? How hopeful or hopeless do you feel about overcoming them?

If you consider yourself to know something about life that leaves you with no need for hope, then what is it that you know and how do you know it?

If you lack this kind of certainty, what kind of hope is most important to you?