inner searcher

Here are my thoughts in no particular order; "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." Marcus Aurelius The universe is filled with facts, love and evil are points of view. I look at it this way, There is no such thing as darkness, there is only an absence of light. Or it could be said this way, Evil is done by flesh and blood men, lost in the darkness. The reason there appears to be so much evil is thanks (mostly) to the media, when was the last time you read a headline like this? "100,000,000 people went to work today and committed no crimes"

I am a late comer to this topic but I would like to toss in my cent and a half's worth. Going back to the original question quoted above, as I see it if we are doing whats right, (this is problematic by itself, being that what is right for you may not be right for anyone else) that choice or decision is far less likely to keep us awake at night or give us that sick feeling in the gut. There are however those times when the "right" thing may not be clear to us or, when this path or that path both may certainly make us wish we had stayed in bed. All of these situations can be improved with a display of faith, meaning prayer and/or meditation, the answers will usually come if we search for them. This of course is keeping in mind that when viewed from the outside, our "right" decision may look like poor judgement to those not involved.

I would say, that yes, it is good to have "faith" unsupported by reason. To me, again, only for me, faith is not a thing of reason or logic. In fact it is quite the opposite. However faith should not be a foolish thing, going back to the tree, if I stand under it as it falls expecting God to stop IT or move ME, that is not faith, that is suicide in denial. I do however believe that after the tree squishes me like a bug that the God of my understanding would collect my immortal remains and deal with me accordingly, probably starting with a speech about dumping funeral expenses on my unsuspecting family. I dont mean to imply that I know anything no-one else knows, faith in anything is a constant struggle for me, I am not a great thinker, I hold no degrees or letters of merit, I didnt even graduate high school. I am just one man on a personal journey. I dont think I would want any kind of "faith" that would stand up to logic or reason. That would make it just another Google search result.

Quite by accident, I seem to have lost my own point, let me clarify, my point (such as it was) was that the chart at the beginning of this thread attempted to pigeon hole various levels or forms of belief, and that attempting to apply any scientific means to faith, (graphs, flow charts, whatever.) is, speaking for myself, counter-intuitive. Of all the things if life and the world, faith is the one thing that defies all reason and explanation. Even something as simple as picking a square that best fits a persons perception of their own beliefs limits that perception to a category. The quicksilver nature of faith should never be limited, even momentarily to a particular spot. My simile with the tree was a rather poor attempt to illustrate the point that Jonathan did far better, although I disagree with the last point.

So, if there is a tree, and I dont believe in it, it still real?

Hmmmmm, reducing the spiritual experience to a graph and four terms that dont explain much of anything..... if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears, was the tree even there?

New and here.