tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18968172.post8788277791234816234..comments2023-11-03T01:13:22.719-07:00Comments on The Rabbi Is IN with Rabbi Rami: BeliefUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18968172.post-58946874895378256742007-03-01T23:38:00.000-08:002007-03-01T23:38:00.000-08:00I have a belief I refuse to give up on. Or at leas...I have a belief I refuse to give up on. Or at least, I have so far. I believe selfhood matters. While I too find it possible to doubt the existence of the self, and am willing to accept its dissolution (either through meditative practice or...um...death), I cannot accept that selfhood is therefore a meaningless or negative condition. <BR/><BR/>There often seems a bias in mysticism to me: away from self and toward God. But God, it seems, moves the other way: from the eternal and ideal to the transcient and concrete. Otherwise, why creat the universe at all? <BR/><BR/>In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he/she/it/they is, God replies: I am that I am. I've seen this translated a number of other ways, but none that satisfy me the way this syntactical glitch does. God's answer here is either that godhood or god consciousness and selfhood or individual consciousness produce and sustain each other. The I/thou relationship central to Judaism is (I think) an insistance on the necessity of both self and god consciousness. So I can accept that I am an illusion: but I refuse to give the illusion up.AaronHerschelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08886387346974535323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18968172.post-34133322898818275122007-02-19T20:46:00.000-08:002007-02-19T20:46:00.000-08:00My own most tenaciously-held belief is not the Car...My own most tenaciously-held belief is not the Cartesian cogito or any variant thereof, just because my existence, and yours, and that of everyone else I encounter, seem too palpably immediate and real to question in the first place. No, for me it's the belief that our species is evolved and the correlative hope that it is still evolving. It's very hard, to the point of disorienting, to imagine reasons strong enough to compel my abandonment of that belief/hope. I don't guess anyone in class said that?Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02115141650963300011noreply@blogger.com