Health and Diet Scottish Recipes Ferret for Ferrets


[pf] Novice and expert (was Christianity)
by Kaleopono
28 November 2000 21:09 UTC

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Nan wrote on November 20:

> According to Cecile, the materialists credo is:
> I believe in the material universe as the only and ultimate reality, a
> universe controlled by fixed physical laws and blind chance.
>
> I maintain that all ideas about God or gods, enlightened beings, prophets
> and saviors, or nonphysical beings or forces are superstitions and
> delusions ... Like the rest of life, my life and my consciousness have no
> objective purpose, meaning or destiny. "
>
> Do you believe that?  Or do you find that nasty and depressing?
>
> What alternatives are there?  Christianity?  Is it part of the solution?
> Or part of the problem?  Or both?  What are its faults?

...to which Diane Fitzsimmons, Kelly Smith, Molly Williams, David A and
David M (Sources of ideas...) responded.  I'm picking up on Diane's
reference to a range in the depth of Christian expression...some Christians
are more advanced, she said.  I do not think that Christianity _per_se_ is
either part of the solution or part of the problem.  I think this is true of
all other spiritual paths, too.

Persons pursuing a faith, indeed any kind of competency whatsoever, must
navigate from the state of novice to the state of expert.  First, there is
the idea of riding a bicycle.  Then there is the period of learning how to
ride a bicycle.  Finally, there is the confident knowing and experience of
being a bicycle rider, at which time one can figuratively say "the bicycle
rides itself".

On the continuum of skill in human development generally, close to the
novice end and far from the expert end, a kind of magical thinking and raw,
conditioned, unaware and far from insightful, not self-governed,
stimulus-response, reactive type of behavior is invariably found.  My
teacher Idries Shah and others like him describe novices as being "raw"
personalities.  A phase of "clearing away the brushwood" is required to
prepare the raw personality for "cooking".

In the sphere of human development "rawness" is equivalent to the sound
barrier in the realm of flight.  Incremental attainments do not occur easily
in a straight-line manner.  Peristence and considerable time are required to
"break the sound barrier" imposed by features of the human organism -- its
associated psychological and mental characteristics -- before the individual
will have "simmered" sufficiently to have any real prospect of genuine
spiritual attainment.

No particular faith is the problem.  This is the fundamental error of holy
war.  The problem is the nature of human beings, which is manifested in
materialists and agnostics as well as in people who subscribe to one
particular spiritual faith or another.  Those who are misguided fools in
their everyday, secular affairs are still going to be misguided fools when
they direct their attention to spiritual concerns.  The problem lies within
each person (the mechanism of perception and thought).  The problem does not
lie in any particular, external object of perception and thought.

Virtually all aspects of industrial culture thrive on, promote and reinforce
"rawness".  If the needed cultural changes are to occur, leaders have got to
develop discrimination as to "cooking methods", "kitchens" and "cooks".

Kaleopono