It looks to me like ideology is one of these neonatal behaviors that culture downloads on us. In other words, belief is for kids. It’s a fairy tale. Marxism is no different than belief in the Easter Bunny. Probability theory is no different than a belief in the Easter Bunny. Everybody needs to get a grip on the uncertainty of the intellectual enterprise.\n\nIf modernism is worth anything, it should carry us to a sense of the fragileness of knowing. There are no platonic archetypes. Gödel showed that simple arithmetic is fraught with uncertainty. Things that we thought were so writ in adamantine that they could never be questioned like the second law of thermodynamics turns out to be written in sand - it's just somebody's opinion. It applies locally in some cases, some times. \n\nSo the way to live with a human mind in the world is not to believe things, that's childish, it's undignified. The thing to do is to build models and to call them that. Call it model building, and why? Because the implication is if you exceed your model or if the thing you're studying has dimensions your model can't encompass, throw the model out! You don't round up everybody who's against the model and send them to the wall because God revealed the model - this would be the usual method of acting. No. You have provisional ever-changing relationships to the world. \n\nAnother way of thinking about this is that what ideology tries to do is create closure. There's something in the human mind - we want to finish the crossword puzzle, we want the good guys to win, we want the equinox to happen agasint the same pattern of fixed stars. In other words, we want order - worse than that we want narrative! But this again is childish. The world is not a bedtime story, it is not a narrative, it does not have white hats and black hats. Part of this growing up thing or growing beyond culture or de-neotonizing one's psyche is to accept a lack of closure. \nIt doesn't come to an end. \nIt never makes sense. \nThere is never the moment of resolution.\nWe want it. We want it. We deserve it, but it ain't in the cards. Everything always transmutes itself and opens up new avenues of possibility.

• culture
• ideology
• archetypes
• relationship
• narrative
• psyche
• self
• closure
• belief
• uncertainty
• lack of closure
• resolution
• dogma
• narrative disorder
• narratization

The image of God as a personal Being, somehow 'outside' or other than the world, had the merit of letting us feel that life is based on intelligence, that the laws of nature are everywhere consistent in that they proceed from one ruler, and that we could let our imaginations go to the limit in conceiving the sublime qualities of this supreme and perfect Being. The image also gave everyone a sense of importance and meaning. For this God is directly aware of every tiniest fragment of dust and vibration of energy, since it is just his awareness of it that enables it to be. This awareness is also love and, for angels and men at least, he has planned an everlasting life of the purest bliss which is to begin at the end of mortal time. But of course there are strings attached to this reward, and those who purposely and relentlessly deny or disobey the divine will must spend eternity in agonies as intense as the bliss of good and faithful subjects. The problem of this image of God was that it became too much of a good thing. Children working at their desks in school are almost always put off when even a kindly and respected teacher watches over their shoulders. How much more disconcerting to realize that each single deed, thought, and feeling is watched by the Teacher of teachers, that nowhere on earth or in heaven is there any hiding-place from that Eye which sees all and judges all. To many people it was therefore an immense relief when Western thinkers began to question this image and to assert that the hypothesis of God was of no help in describing or predicting the course of nature. If everything, they said, was the creation and the operation of God, the statement had no more logic than 'Everything is up.' But, as, so often happens, when one tyrant is dethroned, a worse takes his place. The Crackpot Myth was retained without the Potter. The world was still understood as an artifact, but on the model of an automatic machine. The laws of nature were still there, but no lawmaker. According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going, but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists, naturalists, and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. It had constructed itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist of atoms like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time in virtually infinite time they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the world. The old story of the monkeys and typewriters. In this fully Automatic Model of the universe shape and stuff survived as energy and matter. Human beings, mind and body included, were parts of the system, and thus they were possessed of intelligence and feeling as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms. But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last they get around to typing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they may at any moment relapse into gibberish. Therefore, if human beings want to maintain their fluky status and order, they must work with full fury to defeat the merely random processes of nature. It is most strongly emphasized in this myth that matter is brute and energy blind, that all nature outside human, and some animal, skins is a profoundly stupid and insensitive mechanism. Those who continued to believe in Someone-Up-There-Who-Cares were ridiculed as woolly-minded wishful thinkers, poor weaklings unable to face man's grim predicament in a heartless universe where survival is the sole privilege of the tough guys. If the all-too-intelligent God was disconcerting, relief in getting rid of him was short-lived. He was replaced by the Cosmic Idiot, and people began to feel more estranged from the universe than ever. This situation merely reinforced the illusion of the loneliness and separateness of the ego (now a 'mental mechanism') and people calling themselves naturalists began the biggest war on nature ever waged. In one form or another, the myth of the Fully Automatic Model has become extremely plausible, and in some scientific and academic disciplines it is as much a sacrosanct dogma as any theological doctrine of the past—despite contrary trends in physics and biology. For there are fashions in myth, and the world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik— victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the Fully Automatic Model of the universe as bleak as possible. Nevertheless it remains a myth, with all the positive and negative features of myth as an image used for making sense of the world. It is doubtful whether Western science and technology would have been possible unless we had tried to understand nature in terms of mechanical models.

• love
• sleep
• time
• life
• meaning
• body
• other
• god
• thought
• heaven
• will
• fall
• work
• science
• eternity
• angels
• nature
• poor
• awareness
• children
• matter
• creation
• victory
• past
• situation
• survival
• war
• energy
• ego
• status
• model
• analysis
• philosophy
• dogma
• myth
• loneliness
• logic
• intelligence
• technology
• physics
• shape
• biology

By the end of the third century, Christianity had suddenly flooded the pagan world with its own claims to authorization and began to dissolve into itself many of the then existing pagan practices. The idea of possession was one of those. But it was absorbed in a transcendental way. At almost the same time that Iamblichus was teaching the induction of gods into statues, or young illiterate katochoi to 'participate' in divinity and have 'a common energy' with a god, Athanasius, the competitive Bishop of Alexandria, began claiming the same thing for the illiterate 9 It is safe to suggest that many feats of present-day stage magicians have their origin in duplicating these 'proofs' of divine intervention. Jesus. The Christian Messiah had heretofore been regarded as like Yahweh, a demigod perhaps, half human, half divine, reflecting his supposed parentage. But Athanasius persuaded Constantine, his Council of Nicaea, and most of Christianity thereafter, that Jesus participated in Yahweh, was the same substance, the Bicameral Word made Flesh. I think we can say then that the growing church, in danger of shattering into sects, exaggerated the subjective phenomenon of possession into an objective theological dogma. It did so to assert an even greater claim to an absolute authorization. For Athanasian Christians the actual gods had indeed returned to earth and would return again.

• god
• time
• christianity
• danger
• dogma
• flesh
• energy
• jesus
• authorization
• gods

...in life we are each limited by self-definition. To the extent that we say who we are, what and where we are, we have precluded being able to see beyond that definition.

• definition
• labels
• narratization
• self-definition
• dogma
• life
• self

Understanding and love are values that transcend all dogma.

• dogma
• love
• understanding

I believe that if anyone, Buddhist or Christian, embraces suffering with his or her own mindfulness or allows the Holy Spirit to work within himself, he will come to really understand the nature of that suffering and will no longer impose on himself or others dogmas that constitute obstacles for working toward the cessation of that suffering.\n\n 'When we are caught in notions, rituals, and the outer forms of the practice, not only can we not receive and embody the spirit of our tradition, we become an obstacle for the true values of the tradition to be transmitted. We lose sight of the true needs and actual suffering of people, and the teaching and practice, which were intended to relieve suffering, now cause suffering. Narrow, fundamentalist, and dogmatic practices always alienate people, especially those who are suffering. We have to remind ourselves again and again of our original purpose, and the original teachings and intention of Buddha, Jesus, and other great sages and saints.

• buddha
• dogma
• intention
• jesus
• mindfulness
• suffering
• tradition
• work
• nature
• will
• spirit
• other

The Buddha was not against God. He was only against notions of God that are mere mental constructions that do not correspond to reality, notions that prevent us from developing ourselves and touching ultimate reality.

• buddha
• conscious development
• dogma
• god
• reality
• religion

For a Buddhist to be attached to any doctrine, even a Buddhist one, is to betray the Buddha. It is not words or concepts that are important. What is important is our insight into the nature of reality and our way of responding to reality.'

• buddhism
• dogma
• identification
• love
• reality
• religion
• nature
• buddha

Many of our young people are uprooted.  They no longer believe in the traditions of their parents and grandparents, and they have not found anything else to replace them.  Spiritual leaders need to address this very real issue, but most simply do not know what to do.  They have not been able to transmit the deepest values of their traditions, perhaps because they themselves have not fully understood or experienced them.  When a priest does not embody the living values of a tradition, he or she cannot transmit them to the next generation.  He can only wear the outer garments and pass along the superficial forms.  When the living values are absent, rituals and dogmas are lifeless, rigid, and even oppressive.  Combined with a lack of understanding of people's real needs and a general lack of tolerance, it is little wonder that the young feel alienated within these institutions.

• dogma
• religion
• tolerance
• tradition
• parents
• understanding

One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons - marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

• christianity
• dogma
• legalism
• religion
• understanding
• marriage
• other

It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?'\n\n 'When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.

• dogma
• god
• religion
• spirituality
• understanding
• unity
• time
• will
• language
• light
• conscience
• pride
• rules

The best Christian thought has always seen that only Pharisaism comes through trying to be good.  For sanctity is less in wanting to be moral than in loving God and other men.  But the moralism which condemns a man for not loving is simply adding strength to that sense of fear and insecurity which prevents him from loving.

• christianity
• god
• morality
• love
• fear
• dogma
• thought
• strength
• other

'In short, paradoxical thought led to tolerance and an effort toward self-transformation.  The Aristotelian standpoint led to dogma and science, to the Catholic Church, and to the discovery of atomic energy.'\n

• dogma
• eastern thought
• western thought
• self
• thought
• science
• tolerance
• energy
• transformation

'In religious development (of the Western world) this led to the formulation of dogmas, endless arguments about dogmatic formulations, and intolerance of the 'non-believer' or heretic.  It furthermore led to the emphasis on 'believing in God' as the main aim of a religious attitude.  This, of course, did not mean that there was not also the concept that one ought to live right.  But nevertheless, the person who believed in God - even if he did not live God - felt himself to be superior to the one who lived God, but did not 'believe' in him.'\n

• dogma
• god
• religion
• western thought
• aim
• attitude

Neither Nietzsche nor Hitler nor Rosenberg were mad when they intoxicated themselves and their followers by preaching the myth of the Superman to whom everything is permitted in recognition of his dogmatic and congenital superiority, but worthy of meditation is the fact that all of them, teachers and pupils, became progressively removed from reality as little by little their morality came unglued from the morality common to all times and all civilizations, an integral part of our human heritage which in the end must be acknowledged.

• dogma
• morality
• reality
• myth
• meditation
• civilization
• community