To worship with spirit and truth?
What does it really mean...
by Honesty 9 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Honesty
Oh well. The WT freaks never defined it either.
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Terry
It took me years of reading, studying and thinking to figure a few basic things out. First, I had been trapped in my thinking like a rat in a box. What had trapped me was the failing to understand how much I was being controlled by language.
Then, one day, I discovered how concepts work. I realized I had been using concepts as though they were____something___instead of what they really are___file folder titles.
You see, we create file folders because we are going to put something in them. In order to know what we did put in them we label them with titles.
Spirit.....Truth...are folder titles. These are concepts only.
Here is how a concept works.
Man's mind is finite; but, the universe is not. Once we perceive a tree, for example, we must label it with language to retain it. TREE is the concept. It can mean evergreens or oak or sumac or fruit-bearing growths or tropical varients....etc. Notice: without instances (actual instances) there is only the category of thought to be filled. You cannot draw me a picture of TREE you can only draw me a picture of A TREE. The concept: TREE enables me to contain ALL the various examples without keeping a complete inventory of trees in my head. A concept is shorthand for some kinds of things that exist and may exist in many various ways. We don't say look at that tree, and that tree and that tree and that tree........instead we say, "Look at the forest".
FOREST is conceptual of a grouping of trees.
Etc.
Now the next part is not only interesting, but, vital to understand. Unless (and until) we actually put something REAL into these folders we don't have anything other than a______place____where something goes. Think of an empty chair at the dinner table. Somebody could sit in it or it could remain empty. The chair is just a place for somebody to sit. (An empty folder). We can say "That chair is for Elijah" or "That chair is for a spirit", but, it is still actually empty.
What can you put in a folder that is real? Well, in Philosopy they have invented a word called a referent. ( something referred to; the object of a reference ) But, the object has to exist, you see.
I can't hold spirit in my hand or put it in a folder. I can't put Truth in my pocket. These are concepts.
News Flash! A concept can be real (and have a referent) or it can be imaginary (and be supported only by other floating concepts).
What does this mean?
Unless something real supports and verifies the existence of your file; it can simply be a creation of the imagination.
Bigfoot can be a file. The only thing that can go in the file to support Bigfoot would be rumors, hearsay and phoney home movie footage.
So too with SPIRIT. It would contain a vast number of literary references without an actual objective reference.
Here is the bottom line:
If we have thousands and thousands of concepts (file folders) that contain only fragile literary support, movie instances, word-of-mouth corroborations) we may feel our file is REAL. But, it isn't. It is illusory.
A file folder marked TRUTH should contain actual instances of objective corroborations of statements that conform to reality. Instead, this folder is usually crammed full of assertions, posturing, insistant rhetorical statements from AUTHORITY and little else.
Spirit and Truth...what do these things mean?
It all depends on whether these folders have anything objective in them. If they only have other concepts, mere words, poetic arguments and untestable hypothesis....then they mean NOTHING.
But, be warned: you will have the ___feeling__they do mean something.
Keep your concepts straight. Know the real ones from the unverifiable and elusive ones.
Peter Pan is a concept. The folder contains only what James Barrie wrote and what cartoons and motion pictures have expanded upon. But, never confuse this imaginary folder with an actual being who can fly to Never Never Land.
The fact that we can easily talk about an imaginary being (instantiated by literary and visual referents) should immediately demonstrate how easy it is to get lost among all those folders we have in our mental operating system.
It may be time to take mental inventory.
That is what I've been doing for the last ten years or so. I go through each and every folder one by one and discover which ones should be in the pile marked :imaginary, theoretical, conjectural, hypothetical, poetical, literary....
and the pile marked: this corresponds with reality; see referents inside.
I hope this helps you like it has helped me.
Terry
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FairMind
Worshipping with Spirit ? I believe this means with sincerity, enthusiasm and steadfastness.
Worshipping with Truth ? This is a bit more complicated. I believe it means we must worship God in a way that that he approves as revealed through his word the Bible and through his son Jesus Christ. Of course a Hindu or Muslim, etc. would disagree with the source of revealed truth and this difference in paradigms is what complicates the issue. In any event we cannot be hypocritical in our worship of God.
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Narkissos
Empty words?
Definitely.
Of all words the more precious -- provided their emptiness is acknowledged.
Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
Tao te king, 11 -
trevor
Our spirit is an emotional part of us that connects us to the source of our being.
It is through recognition of our spirit and its separateness from our physical form that we can connect with our non physical reality and the non physical reality of the universe.
If like the Jehovahs Witnesses we believe that we do not have a spirit, then we are materialists and might as well devote our lives to the pursuit of physical pleasure believing that anything else is a trick of the imagination. Or find solace in the substitute for spirit and truth. That is devotion to books, study, ritual and an attempt to turn an emotional journey into an intellectual journey.
Spirit and truth are not subject to conditioning or opinion they simply are and we can allow ourselves to harmonise with them and experience joy and deep contentment or reject them because they cannot be examined under a microscope. -
JamesThomas
Terry, that was beautifully expressed. Well done.
May I suggest that really there is only one file that needs examining. The one which all the other files are assembled, labeled, stuffed and categorized through. The file marked: Me.
It's full of memories,emotions, beliefs, knowledge, desires, dreams and ideas. Is all or any of this, you?
You have given years of attention and credence to files. Has it been noticed what is looking at and within the files? Does That, fit into a file?
By far the closest and most intimate within us, we generally ignore. Instead we construct our identity and reality out of a stack of
cardsfiles within the mind; and wonder why we never come to any truly satisfying conclusions.Some Quantum Physics would seem to imply that That, which witnesses the infinite universe, is not at all separate from the it. But then such a theory is for the Speculative Science file. However, since it is so readily available perhaps it's secrets can be revealed first hand through simple, sincere and earnest questioning of: Who/what am I, really?
j
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Terry
You have given years of attention and credence to files. Has it been noticed what is looking at and within the files? Does That, fit into a file?
My favorite book in the whole wide world (yum yum, I love it!) is Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and it is about this very thing. (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/kelly.html)
Exerpt from interview:
Wired: Looking back, what would you say your first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, was really about?
Hofstadter:
I can see that many people didn't understand what the book was trying to do. Many people took it to be nothing but a title. They would look at the three words - Gödel, Escher, Bach - and if they knew who these people were, they'd say, Oh, this is a book about mathematics, art, and music.
What Gödel, Escher, Bach was really about - and I thought I said it over and over again - was the word I. Consciousness. It was about how thinking emerges from well-hidden mechanisms, way down, that we hardly understand. How not just thinking, but our sense of self and our awareness of consciousness, sets us apart from other complicated things. How understanding self-reference could help explain consciousness so that someday we might recognize it inside very complicated structures such as computing machinery. I was trying to understand what makes for a self, and what makes for a soul. What makes consciousness come out of mere electrons coursing through wires.
And yet many people treated the book as just some sort of big interdisciplinary romp whose point was simply to have fun. In fact, the fun was merely icing on the cake. Originally, the book was purely about the way the proof of Gödel's theorem kept cropping up in the middle of a fortress - Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead - that was designed to keep it out. I thought, Here's a structure that attempts to keep out self-knowledge, but when things get sufficiently complex and sufficiently tangled, all of a sudden - whammo! - it's got self-representation in it. That to me was the trick that underlies consciousness.
So, at first, there were no dialogs, no jokes, no wordplay, and no references to Escher or Bach. But as I typed the manuscript up in '74, I decided it was written in an immature style. I decided to insert the dialogs and the Escher so that the playfulness became a kind of a secondary - but extremely important - part of the book.
Many people focused on those things and treated the book as a big game-playing thing. I had been aiming to have the book reach philosophers, people who thought about the mind and consciousness, and a small number actually saw what I was getting at, but most people just saw the glitter. At the time, I felt I'd lost a great deal by writing a book like that so early in my career, because I was no longer taken seriously by anybody. (end exerpt. Read the whole interview AND the book!)
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El blanko
Spirit and Truth...what do these things mean? It all depends on whether these folders have anything objective in them. If they only have other concepts, mere words, poetic arguments and untestable hypothesis....then they mean NOTHING. But, be warned: you will have the ___feeling__they do mean something.
Not true for the mystic.I am still a believer in the ineffable - that which cannot be bound by human language.
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Terry
Terry wrote: Spirit and Truth...what do these things mean? It all depends on whether these folders have anything objective in them. If they only have other concepts, mere words, poetic arguments and untestable hypothesis....then they mean NOTHING. But, be warned: you will have the ___feeling__they do mean something.
El Blanko: Not true for the mystic
I am still a believer in the ineffable - that which cannot be bound by human language.
My nextdoor neighbors (when I was a child) had a fishpond in their front yard. They had coy and other goldfish and little dazzling artifacts stuck in the cement casing that held the pond above ground. The water was clear all the way to the bottom.
These neighbors had a grandson who would come to visit ever so often named Gary.
We'd play and have a grand old time.
Inevitibly we'd end up at that fishpond staring down into the cold water at the movement below.
Gary liked to lean over the edge and plunge his hand down into the water and stir up the sediment in the bottom. He'd swirl his finger around and around until a pervasive curtain of debris would rise and levitate into the surrounding water making it murky and hiding the fish from view.
He always did this.
I asked him why. Here is what he told me:
"If I can't see what is really in there I can imagine an octopus or a shark!". And that was enough for him.
Now I think I understand what he was doing. Gary was a Mystic!
Terry