Do you hold any spiritual beliefs? The subject has been on my mind a lot lately, particularly since having watched Your Name and Weathering With You. I read a bit about Shinto, and I suppose if anything I'm a bit sympathetic to it and similar kinds of beliefs that hold there is not a distinction between matter and spirit. The Greek notion of logos or pneuma is actually pretty similar in this regard. Of course a difficulty is that I have never experienced anything that I would call spiritual, which could lead me to believe in a spiritual side of life. Kind of related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=938jM17N_38
>Do you hold any spiritual beliefs? Yes. I think it's most likely that there's no such thing as spirit.
I couldn't attain any sense of spirituality as I never got the chance to get in contact with it, it was not intriguing (and beautiful) enough. There are no higher powers, no angels, no souls, no justice. The things we call demoniac are nothing but a solipsistic observation. Sometimes I fear that life after death will be never-ending dolorous madness, but that's a sporadic feeling when I'm ill. Otherwise I'm just concerned about my daily desires being fulfilled. It's sad sometimes but I don't sense any sentient being but myself, but the more important question is how to fill in the hours between sleep. No piece of information is able to truly change anything(but some thought mechanisms).
I hold the belief that at a rough level there is some sort of collective conscious, and like you mentioned that >there is not a distinction between matter and spirit.
If there's no disctintion between matter and spirit, what is matter at all? See Berkeley.
Belief is something you choose for yourself, anyone can have spiritual beliefs if they want to. Since spiritual beliefs necessarily defy conventional logic, its impossible to disprove them convincingly and since they require faith, proving them convincingly negates the spiritual element. Until the airplane was invented, its was generally considered a given fact that birds could fly because god made them that way. These days we generally believe that birds can fly because of aerodynamics and evolution, but almost none of the people who hold those beliefs have studied either issue in detail. Most of the people who believe that birds can fly because of aerodynamics and evolution believe so because they trust "the experts". "The experts" function as the priests of the system of belief for most people, because those people have faith in "the experts". For most people the idea that birds can fly because of aerodynamics and evolution because "the experts" say so is fundamentally a spiritual type of belief, its not one based on learning, experience or observations, its a belief based on trusting their priests. Taking all that into account, there are probably a lot more people who hold spiritual beliefs than there are people who will admit that their system of beliefs is based on faith. Its not out of the question that one day "the experts" will fully discern the functional mechanisms that make DNA work the way it does and they might understand how one very small core molecule governs the life of a person and determines their character and characteristics and then they'll be telling us all that souls were real all along, just like what those stupid old religious texts have been saying for thousands of years.
I'm really superstitious.
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