That about sums it up.  The use of logic, excuses, rationalizations that we all make use of in life is helpful to understand concepts, but where the soul is concerned, the true spiritual nature is that of how you feel, not what rational excuses you make up for your daily actions.  This is why, if someone acts lovingly because they believe society says they are supposed to, but does not feel love in the process, it is a fairly useless endeavor.

Emotions either are or they aren't.  Its like pregnancy.  If you feel good to your core, you are probably on the right track, if you feel regret, sadness, guilt, it is a sign that something is wrong.  Rationalizations don't make it better.  Prozac may numb it up, but the underlying problem persists.

It therefore seems to me that getting in touch with our emotions, facing up to our negative ones and encouraging our positive ones, are possibly more important than rationalizing our actions and going down an unloving path.

I thought I knew what belief was.  I thought that the rational mind could impress belief into the subconscious - I still do, but with this caveat.  Belief must be felt.  Right down to your bones.  Feeling comes closer to our spirituality than anything else.  Our rationality and thought are but tools to let us get in touch with our feelings.

My two cents,

Matthew

Wonderful poetic eulogy, Alysia - now all we need is somebody who wants to die and use it?

OK Matthew, I spent until late last night thinking about "abstraction" and sch. I hink that I might be able to better describe what I've been trying to say for the last month or so. Basically, feeling is it. No argument. It's how we feel and what we do to "think" with our feelings.

Spiritual reality must agree with material reality, since everything ultimately is one thing. But without a body, we have all the logic, the terms, the stimulii and so on, all supported externally to ourselvesin the surrounding world. This is necessary because we have nowhere else to be. The outside world  can be thought of as a lot of points invarious relationships with one another by which they take on the (relative) properties of "matter".  A naked spirit is forced to use these same points of reality by sort of superposing the definitions of self onto the existing definitions of the situation. In fact, we do this anyhow, but we carry our own set of points in space until they fall off at death.

Since we share space with external reality, we can bring forth anything that is already defined, at least potentially, by the outside world. This feels as if we are having moral rules imposed on us. And, when the violation of these rules occurs, it is an "absolute" violation, not a "degree of error" as our mind would normaly tell us. In this sense, we can't abstract it.

We can think in any way that is not self-contradictory, which can include signal representations, or other symbolic representations. That kind of abstraction works, because it is already supported by reality. The problem seems to be one of not violating the collection of terms under which we are able to define ourselves into existence.

When a person does something really terrible, then the act might violate the rules of behavior required to continue existence. In that case, whatever the action gains is lost because it self-destructs.  What this does is cause a loss of  our abilities etc, to the degree that they depended upon the self-contradictory action. This is often felt as pain, hence some people suffer. Other people simply accept that they messed up, ask for assiatance not to do it again, and suffer not at all.

The entire rgument that I've been trying to express about thinking after death is more or less caught up in these ideas. Whether or not I've expressed it well, I don't know, but perhaps this makes more sense. 

As an example, when you experience "pure awareness" as a meditative state, notice that you have acess to thoughts that more or less surround you as properties of reality, but so long as you remain in that meditative state, you do not have access to the kind of thinking usually associated with thejabbering self-talk mechanisms.  To get to that inner self-dialogue again, it requires that you alter the meditation to bring up inner thoughts, and then everything sort of collapses into an internal discussion for most of us.

One reason that I'm so interested in this is that I've spent literally decades trying to express how thinking works in deep meditation, which is essentially the same as being dead.

dave