May all your plans be thwarted...

Originally posted by vistesd
Or: Did he wholeheartedly believe that (and feel as if) he had a personal relationship with Christ based on the active presence of the Holy Spirit—but ultimately realized that it was nevertheless a false belief?

Are you leveling the old charge that those of us who were once—and for many, many years—Christian were not, well, really Christians?

T ...[text shortened]... nalogy you guys have tossed about here: “You couldn’t have really been a Ford person...”

I'm simply stating that once you have known the touch of the living Christ in your life then nothing can ever be the same again. One may turn away from it but it will still haunt your life.

It's not for me to say whether someone is really a christian or not because I cannot judge , it's not my place to. However , I do believe that an intellectual belief is far easier to lose than an intimate experience of Christ's loving presence.

Once you get a taste of Christ it's like having driven a Rolls Royce (I imagine) , you will always know what driving can really be like and the little fiat won't feel as good.

So I guess what I am saying is that true Christianity is more like getting to know someone than some philosophy. That's what makes it different from anything else. So it's like if someone says they have have had expereinced being totally in love but they aren't that bothered about having that again - you immediately know they must be lying because if they had, they would not be saying that.

Originally posted by Nordlys
It always reminds me of doctors who believe that some disease is incurable, and if someone is cured, they say that person must have been misdiagnosed. The incurability becomes a defining criterion for the disease.

When I was a Christian, it was anything but an intellectual affair. It was when I started to use my intellect again that I lost my faith.

Ahhhh..but why did you feel that you needed to ignore your intellect in the first place? What I am suggesting here is not just an emotional thing , it's experiential. What I would be interested in is not whether you ever felt emotional about your faith but whether you ever felt you were not alone when you were praying. By this I mean to ask if you actually felt his presence.

Originally posted by Nordlys
It always reminds me of doctors who believe that some disease is incurable, and if someone is cured, they say that person must have been misdiagnosed. The incurability becomes a defining criterion for the disease.

When I was a Christian, it was anything but an intellectual affair. It was when I started to use my intellect again that I lost my faith.

Well put.

To be fair, I have to say that Zen is not a strictly intellectual affair, though, either. It is about seeing how the mind works: how thoughts/concepts arise from the mind-ground in the same way that visual images arise in the visual cortex in response to stimuli; what we “see” is, in fact, those images formed by the mind. Such images are sufficiently (and unsurprisingly) coherent with the actual world that we are able to navigate and survive (else, we would not, as a species, be here). The same with smells, sounds, touch. Similarly with our ability to form concepts and to reason.

Zen Buddhism is not anti-reason. When we rely on our reason, we are relying on our ability to form concepts that coherently correspond to the real (again, no surprise that our mind should have that capability). But we must take care not to bewitch our own minds, to take the concept for the thing, the formed image for the underlying reality, the map for the territory. (The “territory” itself is ineffable precisely because it is non-conceptual.) That is why Zen practice entails simply returning to that pre-conceptual (and hence non-conceptual) ground of awareness.

Religious thoughts are not more privileged than any others in this regard. Nor are all the thoughts that form the “I-thought-complex.” In samadhi, or the Buddha-mind, or the ground-state of awareness, or whatever one wants to call it, one is simply not adding any thoughts/concepts to being aware—including any “I-thoughts.”

When I posit non-dualism, I too have moved from the ground-state to the domain of the concept-making mind—just as has a dualist-theist. I am trying to translate experiences of the ineffable into corresponding effable concepts. That is why whatever I say in that manner must be subject to reason, the empirical findings of the sciences, etc. More practically, I may simply be trying to use words to point toward the ineffable; using poetic language, for example, or Zen koans, to try to elicit (to steal bbarr’s word) an experience of the ineffable ground. If I followed bbarr’s counsel (and LemonJello’s—and Hafiz’s, and a lot of the Zen masters&rsquo😉 that is all I would do; but “I” am too much of a talker... 😉 Then again, some of them are, too...

Maya
is for the playing in.
Just don’t get caught—

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Zen does not have a corner on any of this. The “perennial philosophy” is expressed in many systems: Advaita Vedanta (Hinduism), Taoism, Sufism (Islam), Hasidism/Kabbalah (Judaism), and among Christian mystics such as Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart—each with its own somewhat different take on it, as well as rich aesthetic differences in their symbolism.

Originally posted by knightmeister
I'm simply stating that once you have known the touch of the living Christ in your life then nothing can ever be the same again. One may turn away from it but it will still haunt your life.

It's not for me to say whether someone is really a christian or not because I cannot judge , it's not my place to. However , I do believe that an intellectual b ...[text shortened]... mediately know they must be lying because if they had, they would not be saying that.

I can (and do) say the same thing about experiencing Buddha-mind. 😉

Your mind might translate that into a personal presence, like the Christ, but that is back in concept-making mind. I have no problem with that, per se.

By “translate”, I don’t necessarily mean a conscious, intellectual thing. The mind can immediately “translate” an experience of the ineffable into concepts, images, categories that it can get a handle on. Some people’s translation is into an experience of the risen Christ, some into Krishna, etc., etc. (Read this as an expansion on my post above to Nordlys.) Then people argue over which translation is the “right” one—or which is the “real” Rolls Royce.

If you spend sufficient time just being aware, and watching how all such concepts and thoughts and images arise in the mind, you will become aware of your own “translation” process—and you can relish that, too, as a natural part of your own existential being. And you may find that the Christian paradigm best expresses, for you, the whole thing.

Originally posted by vistesd
I can (and do) say the same thing about experiencing Buddha-mind. 😉

Your mind might translate that into a personal presence, like the Christ, but that is back in concept-making mind. I have no problem with that, per se.

By “translate”, I don’t necessarily mean a conscious, intellectual thing. The mind can immediately “translate” an experience of t ...[text shortened]... l being. And you may find that the Christian paradigm best expresses, for you, the whole thing.

Whoah! Hang on a minute! Am I to take from this that your experience of the "Buddha mind" is that of experiencing the presence of the Buddha himself in the room with you?

When I say experience , I do not mean an interior or internal emotional or conceptual experience. I mean an EXTERIOR experience as well. One experiences the Holy Spirit as being in the room and also within oneself. Many would call this madness but I doubt you feel that the Buddha is still alive and communing with his followers maybe you do. I think you might be talking about "enlightenment" and "consciousness" whereas I am talking about a real presence.

Christ did not say "you will have nice thoughts about me that will be very enlightening" , he said "there will I be amongst you" . He actually meant it as well.

Originally posted by knightmeister
Ahhhh..but why did you feel that you needed to ignore your intellect in the first place? What I am suggesting here is not just an emotional thing , it's experiential. What I would be interested in is not whether you ever felt emotional about your faith but whether you ever felt you were not alone when you were praying. By this I mean to ask if you actually felt his presence.

Well, I would have said yes, I have felt a presence and that I wasn't alone, but from what you just replied to vistesd, I'd say no, I have never felt an exterior presence like someone being in the room with me when praying. I never expected that either, or thought that other Christians experienced it that way. So you can actually hear and see that presence?

The reason why I think I (subconsciously, of course) ignored my intellect is that I so much wanted to believe and trust. I tried to keep out the contradictions or the unpleasant aspects of Christianity.

Originally posted by knightmeister
Whoah! Hang on a minute! Am I to take from this that your experience of the "Buddha mind" is that of experiencing the presence of the Buddha himself in the room with you?

When I say experience , I do not mean an interior or internal emotional or conceptual experience. I mean an EXTERIOR experience as well. One experiences the Holy Spirit as being i enlightening" , he said "there will I be amongst you" . He actually meant it as well.

Whoah! Hang on a minute! Am I to take from this that your experience of the "Buddha mind" is that of experiencing the presence of the Buddha himself in the room with you?

Absolutely not. I did not say “an experience of the Buddha.” Buddha-mind is a term used to designate being in a certain state of awareness.

When I say experience , I do not mean an interior or internal emotional or conceptual experience. I mean an EXTERIOR experience as well. One experiences the Holy Spirit as being in the room and also within oneself. Many would call this madness but I doubt you feel that the Buddha is still alive and communing with his followers maybe you do. I think you might be talking about "enlightenment" and "consciousness" whereas I am talking about a real presence.

When we see an image in our visual cortex, our brain operates to “project” that image back into the exterior world, so to speak: to the location it identifies as the source-point of the sensory data from which it constructed the visual image that we perceive.

Any experience can be so imaged, projected and exteriorized by the mind. Even dreams sometimes seem so real to the dreamer—including “exterior” aspects and images, such as people, houses, etc.

People whose mind “translates” (again, see my post to Nordlys) from the non-conceptual experience of reality to Krishna being present with them—well, do you accord that the same reality that you do with the presence of Christ. After all, their experience seems as real to them as yours does to you: a real external presence of the real Krishna. Or do you deconstruct their claims, from the perspective of your own religious conclusions, in a similar manner as I am doing with yours?

Now, you conclude that your experience is that of a real external presence. My point is that that is the result of how your mind translated the experience, with that translation subsequently (or perhaps a priori) assessed in terms of a particular set of religious beliefs and claims—themselves likely originally based upon similar translations of similar experiences by people from earlier times. Even if your conclusion is correct, that is more or less the process. You may or may not have been predisposed to a certain kind of translation by prior religious experience, upbringing, etc. I am not claiming that you were.

The point is: there is an experience, there is a translation into certain mental content (e.g., a presence), and there is an assessment of that translation based on other concepts, beliefs, etc., etc. The mind plays an active (not simply a receptive) role in all of that.

The Zen masters caution one to treat all such translations as makyo: bedeviling illusions. I am not so severe. However, behind all the makings of the mind (images, ideas, concepts, thoughts, words, symbols), there is the ineffable ground, in which and of which we are, prior to all conceptualizations. What we conclude from that is what we conclude from that, on whatever basis, for whatever reasons. That is the “thing”; the rest is what we think about it.

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EDIT: Of course there is a sense of presence: we are immersed in presence (of which we ourselves are). That does not mean that there is a singular, supernatural, person present—even if our minds translate it thus in the midst of the immediate experience.

That is, I am talking about translation prior to consciously thinking about it. But even as such translation begins, we are floating back from the raw awareness into concept-representations. The key is to either (a) not follow that process, and return to non-conceptual awareness; or (b) to go ahead and follow it, but know that’s what you’re doing. Simply become acclimated to what I called the “ground-state” of non-conceptual awareness, and then you can observe from there how mental images, feelings, concepts arise—including that of a personal presence.

Then you can decide whether the translations of your mind are accurate. Until then, it is simply an assumption, qualitatively not much different from the assumption that the desert heat waves are really an oasis over there, even though one is in fact hallucinating. (I only use the word “hallucination” here as an egregiously erroneous translation.) One cannot tell just from the content; no matter how many people have translated the experience into similar content.

I conclude that translating the sense of presence into a singular person-presence is a mirage, based upon my own experience of moving in and out of that ground-state; you conclude that it is not. I am suggesting that you dig deeper, experientially, into the basis of that conclusion; you may still come to the same conclusion. But it won’t be based on the assumption that what seems external in fact is external, or that your mind plays no creative role in translating the experience into representational content.

Originally posted by knightmeister
So when you believed did you have an intellectual belief or did you have a personal relationship with Christ based on the active presence of the Holy Spirit ?

Some of both. I prayed to Jesus and spoke in tongues, and I liked discussing the philosophy of the faith.

Originally posted by knightmeister
Once you get a taste of Christ it's like having driven a Rolls Royce (I imagine) , you will always know what driving can really be like and the little fiat won't feel as good.

And some will shun the Rolls Royce in favor of a Cadillac Escalade.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
Some of both. I prayed to Jesus and spoke in tongues, and I liked discussing the philosophy of the faith.

Yes , yes , but did you feel his love and intimacy reach you at the deepest level of your heart? Did he touch you with his tenderness and compassion? Did he whisper to you in a silence beyond words that he knows you and every hurt within you? Did he love you in a way that you knew that he knew even the worst parts of you and loved you anyway? Have you wept in his arms?

This is the real Jesus. Tongues or no tongues it makes no difference. The real question is did you get intimate with him? Was it a love affair?

Originally posted by Nordlys
Well, I would have said yes, I have felt a presence and that I wasn't alone, but from what you just replied to vistesd, I'd say no, I have never felt an exterior presence like someone being in the room with me when praying. I never expected that either, or thought that other Christians experienced it that way. So you can actually hear and see that presence? ...[text shortened]... e and trust. I tried to keep out the contradictions or the unpleasant aspects of Christianity.

I don't know about hearing or seeing the presence of Christ but I know of some who have or have had visions. Personally , it's more like a spiritual sense , a bit like when someone who has a charismatic personality is in the room. You just sense the vibe off them. I felt the Holy Spirit was in the room once and just reached out with my arms and beckoned him to enter me and be with me. I felt the spirit enter into my stomach area and lift an emotional block I was having , I felt light headed and wierd but peaceful afterwards , but the whole thing started with a sense of the exterior.

You see jesus did say that he would be present amongst his followers. There's no indication he was talking symbolically either. Think about it. Jesus is supposed to know everything about you. If this is true how does he know? Surely , he has to spend a lot of time with you to know you.

Originally posted by vistesd
[b]Whoah! Hang on a minute! Am I to take from this that your experience of the "Buddha mind" is that of experiencing the presence of the Buddha himself in the room with you?

Absolutely not. I did not say “an experience of the Buddha.” Buddha-mind is a term used to designate being in a certain state of awareness.

When I say experience , I do no r mind plays no creative role in translating the experience into representational content.

I have no problem accepting that it is an act of faith to assume that my experience of an external presence is really the living Jesus standing in the midst of me. I could be hallucinating or deceiving myself. Mind you I could also be deceiving myself that I am deceiving myself and thus talking myself out of a real experience.There are many reasons why we might not want an actual living Jesus hanging around us in our lives. We might prefer to go our own way and stay in charge of our affairs. So we pay our money and take our pick!

I can never be 100% sure whether the experience is true or not true. However , the love of Christ is such that it is worth stepping out in faith for. The experience itself seems real enough and if I question it I might as well question whether my foot exists as well. There is also the sheer quality of the experience too. The love and intimacy that goes with it can be incredible.

Funny thing is I hav very little religious background and when I first started having this experience I had little idea of what it was.

Originally posted by knightmeister
I have no problem accepting that it is an act of faith to assume that my experience of an external presence is really the living Jesus standing in the midst of me. I could be hallucinating or deceiving myself. Mind you I could also be deceiving myself that I am deceiving myself and thus talking myself out of a real experience.There are many reasons wh ...[text shortened]... ous background and when I first started having this experience I had little idea of what it was.

This is interesting: I was going to post something similar—although the mirror-image—last night, but didn’t. The only comments I have are non-argumentative:

There are many reasons why we might not want an actual living Jesus hanging around us in our lives. We might prefer to go our own way and stay in charge of our affairs. So we pay our money and take our pick!

Just so you recognize the counter-possibility. I’m sure you yourself have been on the receiving end of “just wanting to avoid responsibility for your own life” kind of charge. And these are hardly the only options: peoples’ motivations are myriad and diverse. What is important is that each of us own up to ourselves what those motivations are as we uncover them; what others may think our motivations are is not nearly so important.

I can never be 100% sure whether the experience is true or not true. However , the love of Christ is such that it is worth stepping out in faith for. The experience itself seems real enough and if I question it I might as well question whether my foot exists as well. There is also the sheer quality of the experience too. The love and intimacy that goes with it can be incredible.

I have an Episcopal priest friend (who incidentally has a Ph.D. in comparative religion, focusing on Hinduism) who put it almost exactly the same way. The whole “quality of experience” thing comes under the heading of what I call aesthetics: what enables one to live a rich, harmonious and flourishing life is validated thereby. The aesthetics of living is, for me at any rate, a far bigger affair—and why I said to Nordlys that my Zen is not just a matter of intellect.

I think you might like Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life: he is an existentialist philosopher who is starkly honest about his motivations, what he can and cannot intellectually affirm, and why the aesthetic sense (my term here, not his) overrides that for him; he was also a Roman Catholic.

Funny thing is I had very little religious background and when I first started having this experience I had little idea of what it was.

Our history here is one of almost polar opposites. I won’t go into detail, but I had experiences of an external personal presence that were so powerful that I literally could not remain standing. I spent years investigating them, and how my mind worked. I came to different conclusions than you, but frankly (opening myself up to all the mind-readers who are willing to deny this for me!) I would have liked them real—well, the experience is real, it is what I have called the translation that I concluded, reluctantly, was a sort of mirage.

In the end, one could say that I found a different aesthetic, one that I think is also more reasonable.

Be well.

Originally posted by knightmeister
Yes , yes , but did you feel his love and intimacy reach you at the deepest level of your heart? Did he touch you with his tenderness and compassion? Did he whisper to you in a silence beyond words that he knows you and every hurt within you? Did he love you in a way that you knew that he knew even the worst parts of you and loved you anyway? Have you ...[text shortened]... t makes no difference. The real question is did you get intimate with him? Was it a love affair?

This sounds awfully specific. Are you describing your own experiences?

Originally posted by vistesd
Or: Did he wholeheartedly believe that (and feel as if) he had a personal relationship with Christ based on the active presence of the Holy Spirit—but ultimately realized that it was nevertheless a false belief?

Are you leveling the old charge that those of us who were once—and for many, many years—Christian were not, well, really Christians?

T ...[text shortened]... nalogy you guys have tossed about here: “You couldn’t have really been a Ford person...”

Or: Did he wholeheartedly believe that (and feel as if) he had a personal relationship with Christ based on the active presence of the Holy Spirit—but ultimately realized that it was nevertheless a false belief?

It is possible for people to abandon their faith in Jesus Christ. It doesn't matter what their secret underlying reasons are for doing so, the only thing that matters is that they no longer believe.

"Anyone who puts a hand to the plow and then looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62).

When a person no longer believes, what does that prove? Does it prove that person was never sincere at one point or another in their Christian life? No, but neither does it prove that Christ is not real or that He is untrustworthy.

I.e. arguments against the validity of Christianity carry no additional weight just because they come from former Christians.

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"They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us" (1 John 2:19).