I am also thinking about thinking. My hurdle is that i constantly discover being trapped in cultural believes and that it is hard to free yourself from these. I am reading Chris Wallis’s book: Near Enemies. One section is on the Near Enemy: listen to your heart. Benedict is saying: Listen with the ear of your heart. I am coming back to this phrase often. How can these sayings be an enemy? It is the enemy when we trap ourselves in assumptions: I feel this way and so it is the truth ( like today where all this hatred is projected unto innocent victims ) instead of digging deeper and admitting: in this moment i have a closed heart and can’t love anyone and in the next moment my heart is open as i catch myself smiling at a stranger. My search is and will be continuously, ‘who am i in this reality and what can i really see and what not’.
Sometimes I wonder if everything isn't an assumption. I remember writing a paper in a philosophy class in college where I asked, "When I drink my coffee in the morning, how do I know it is coffee and not cyanide?" The truth is, I don't know. It is an assumption. And then my brain goes all fuzzy. All I can assume (there I go again) is that the oneness, the melting into God that the mystics talk about, is where the assumptions fall away and I become pure being or essence or however it is described. And I have no clue what any of that means other than I want to keep striving for it and hope that it is what comes after life on this earth! What do you think?
“To be a monk is to live like we believe it.” Amen
I am also thinking about thinking. My hurdle is that i constantly discover being trapped in cultural believes and that it is hard to free yourself from these. I am reading Chris Wallis’s book: Near Enemies. One section is on the Near Enemy: listen to your heart. Benedict is saying: Listen with the ear of your heart. I am coming back to this phrase often. How can these sayings be an enemy? It is the enemy when we trap ourselves in assumptions: I feel this way and so it is the truth ( like today where all this hatred is projected unto innocent victims ) instead of digging deeper and admitting: in this moment i have a closed heart and can’t love anyone and in the next moment my heart is open as i catch myself smiling at a stranger. My search is and will be continuously, ‘who am i in this reality and what can i really see and what not’.
Sometimes I wonder if everything isn't an assumption. I remember writing a paper in a philosophy class in college where I asked, "When I drink my coffee in the morning, how do I know it is coffee and not cyanide?" The truth is, I don't know. It is an assumption. And then my brain goes all fuzzy. All I can assume (there I go again) is that the oneness, the melting into God that the mystics talk about, is where the assumptions fall away and I become pure being or essence or however it is described. And I have no clue what any of that means other than I want to keep striving for it and hope that it is what comes after life on this earth! What do you think?
Ohhh lots to think (slowly) on here!