I had a great deal of difficulty understanding faith, trust, and surrender as you talk about them here for a long time. My trust was always conditional, and it seemed obvious to me that it should be that way. It wasn’t until after a lot of meditation I realized there was a kind of unconditional trust I could have: trust in the world to be just as it is. That is, no matter what I believe about the world, it will always be just the way it is regardless of how I feel about it or how I want it to be.
I feel like I keep having this same insight over and over again, deepening my understanding of it each time. I wrote a bit about my current understanding of it a while ago, but I expect I’ll develop a yet deeper, more subtle appreciation for this type of trust in the world to be just as it is in the future.
But your original post implied a sort of scientific nihilism.
>That is, no matter what I believe about the world, it will always be just the way it is regardless of how I feel about it or how I want it to be.
Your beliefs affect your actions, even if it’s so small that it’s hard to register. Being a skeptic in anything may make your face contort in such a way that it resembles incredulity; changing how others view the topic and how the talker responds to you. I think what you really mean is that you have better understood the order of magnitude that your beliefs have on the world. Where previously, you may have believed that thinking something will have great affect on the world, you now realize that thinking something will have a small, but still existent, effect on the world.
Alas, I can’t cram a full understanding of the world into just a few short sentences, and the moment I say anything at all I necessarily say something wrong.
Yes, what I present above emphasizes a particular aspect of our existence. As you say, how I feel about things and how I want things to be are real processes in the universe that have downstream effects. It’s also true I can’t make a cake appear before me by closing my eyes and wishing really hard that I had a cake.
I had a great deal of difficulty understanding faith, trust, and surrender as you talk about them here for a long time. My trust was always conditional, and it seemed obvious to me that it should be that way. It wasn’t until after a lot of meditation I realized there was a kind of unconditional trust I could have: trust in the world to be just as it is. That is, no matter what I believe about the world, it will always be just the way it is regardless of how I feel about it or how I want it to be.
I feel like I keep having this same insight over and over again, deepening my understanding of it each time. I wrote a bit about my current understanding of it a while ago, but I expect I’ll develop a yet deeper, more subtle appreciation for this type of trust in the world to be just as it is in the future.
So individual humans have no appreciable affect on the world?
Of course they do, but those effects don’t happen by simply believing they will happen. Believing something doesn’t change the world; acting does.
But your original post implied a sort of scientific nihilism.
>That is, no matter what I believe about the world, it will always be just the way it is regardless of how I feel about it or how I want it to be.
Your beliefs affect your actions, even if it’s so small that it’s hard to register. Being a skeptic in anything may make your face contort in such a way that it resembles incredulity; changing how others view the topic and how the talker responds to you. I think what you really mean is that you have better understood the order of magnitude that your beliefs have on the world. Where previously, you may have believed that thinking something will have great affect on the world, you now realize that thinking something will have a small, but still existent, effect on the world.
Alas, I can’t cram a full understanding of the world into just a few short sentences, and the moment I say anything at all I necessarily say something wrong.
Yes, what I present above emphasizes a particular aspect of our existence. As you say, how I feel about things and how I want things to be are real processes in the universe that have downstream effects. It’s also true I can’t make a cake appear before me by closing my eyes and wishing really hard that I had a cake.