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author_by_night) wrote2007-11-29 08:13 am
Leap of Faith: A Spiritual Invitation
In today's world, sharing your beliefs is taboo. If you do share them, you are judged, you are told not to share them so loudly, and there are hateful people who actually do horrible things to people of different faiths than themselves.
A few years ago, I did a Livejournal Invitation wherein people shared their beliefs. The purpose was to express your beliefs - whether Christianity, Islam, Taoism, or even Atheism - without fear of condemnation, without fear of judgement. I learned so much about my flisters, and about faiths I knew little about or had never heard of at all. I am going to open the invitation once more.
Say anything, anything at all. And your beliefs do not even have to be specific to a religion - if you believe in reincarnation, if you believe in ghosts, if you believe in parallel universes... those may not necessarily be tied to a religion, (although they may be), but they are still beliefs, and I'd like to hear about them.
One warning, however - I will state that this is not a debate. We are not here to condemn other beliefs - only to express our own.
no subject
1) I do not believe in the Mahayana form of Buddhism: mainly in the existence of bodhisattvas (kind of parallel to Christian saints) or that Buddha is a powerful, omnipresent force. I believe that there lived a man who became Buddha -- became Enlightened -- and his teachings are the true path to attain Enlightenment. I believe in reincarnation and karma and their impact in controlling all of the ever-changing life forces in the universe. I believe that Buddha saw the cogs of the machine in his Enlightenment, but that he does not exist in this world any longer, because he broke out of it eons ago.
I practice ancestor-worship because I believe that our ancestors are important and should be respected. Mostly, however, family altars serve as a memorial for them -- I don't believe that my ancestors live in them or that they have any "powers from beyond" that could influence my life. I bow to them out of respect for them and respect for myself and where I come from.
2) I respect Christianity and am fascinated by concepts of damnation, redemption, and deliverance, but I can never believe in Christianity at all. Mostly because I feel that Mahayana Buddhism and modern Christianity had changed from their original, philosophical intents that their founders had. They both were simply good ideas that got mystified and perverted through time to become a set of superstitions and dogmatic beliefs.
3) I believe in miracles, namely one miracle that should be repeated by everyone: that miracle of pure human connection. There are so many aspects that block out full understanding between people: a person's upbringing, their prejudices, their ignorance, or simply their "self-centered" viewpoint (not that a person is arrogant or narcisstic, but that they simply cannot understand something they have not experienced themselves. People may sympathize, but they can never empathize). Humans in this sense are raised "blinded," by their own viewpoint. As a result, they can cause pain and suffering to others, willfully or unintentionally. It's horrible, this blindness. And it cannot be controlled by a person -- a person can live out their whole life with this blindness and never realize it. That's what makes it so terrible.
That is why I believe that for a person to connect, for even two people to see each other for who they are -- that is a miracle. Because those moments happen only a handful of times in a lifetime, I suspect. That you can look at a person and see them for themselves and accept them and feel like more of a whole person because of it. I'm not taking about love motivating this connection, religious love or otherwise -- because love itself is a blindness, it smooths over the cracks, it makes exceptions, because I believe that no one can love everyone equally. I'm talking about acceptance truly and wholy without judgment but still being able to care for them. Buddhism calls it compassion; Christianity calls it grace. I call it a miracle.
4) I'm an agnostic, because while I believe in forces greater than ourselves, but I also think that because of humankind's inherent blindness, it is impossible to believe in the validity of one answer or even if the answer can exist for us.
5) Humankind will never fully understand the spiritual realm, but that it exists, along with other supernatural creatures. Ghosts, energy forces, fairies, demons, werewolves, vampires, zombies -- the whole lot of them -- are real beings, but do not exists in same way portrayed in pop culture or conventional mythology.