Maya is commonly translated as "illusion". I think this is incorrect; a more functionally accurate equivalent is Perception.

Certain practices (meditation, prayer, advanced martial arts, breathing), or certain spontaneous experiences (sublime music, great sex, magnificent landscapes), :cool: may weaken our inner filtering/structuring mechanism that upholds the Consensus Reality into which all of us, by consequence of our upbringing, have been initiated. That may bring is closer to the fundamental Reality, for the world is not as we perceive (Maya).

Well, those are my thoughts...

It doesn't matter; they're all the same, just looked at from different perspectives. :)

ah, the hotdog joke... :p

it's funny - I'm not really religious, but I hate to tell that to people, because then they think I'm an athiest, or an agnostic, or something like that. nothing could be farther from the truth.

butwaddayagonnado...

Same goes for me. I like to study religions and mythology a lot. I think that the Norse and Greek gods were way cooler than any modern day god, but hey that is a bit beside the point. A friend of mine turned me on to a term which I just recently learned as ignostic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignostic

Interesting term.

Don't forget entheogens. :)

OT observation
 

Without intending to denigrate any of the posters in this thread by saying so, I've come to the conclusion reading the whole thread over that most of you must be between 17 and 30. I say that from the perspective of a retiree who just turned 70 with 3 adult "kids" in their 40s and 7 grandchildren ranging from 4 to 10. The age range I quoted is when you wonder about such things and explore your thoughts and feelings about them through the filters installed, as ArticStones put it, by consequence of your upbringing. Wondering, perhaps, if the grass is greener in another pasture.

Having done that myself then, particularly as two of my best high school friends were Jewish and Roman Catholic counterfoils to my Protestantism, and a bit later, in University, a Hindu (from Madras) and a Zoroastrian (from Bombay via Trinidad). In my first job as a university professor, my first office mate was Chinese, my second was a Hindu (with whom I jointly owned a sailboat and who was married to a Hasidic Jew with a PhD in Musicology who decrypted ancient musical notations), and my third was a Muslim Egyptian. Later, I went to Thailand for a spell, accompanied by a Turk and an Egyptian Copt (whose first name was Stalin), and, of course, worked with two Buddhists (at Suranaree U in KoRat where the dorm room I was in had a copy in English of Buddha's teachings).

In spite of these exposures and uncountable discussions over a beer at a barbecue or in an Airplane, I've been fascinated, but in the end (at about 40) reverted to my "Consensus Reality into which all of us, by consequence of our upbringing, have been initiated". Full circle. There are no right answers, so you end up sticking with what you know in your bones, inculcated by your parents, for the most part.

OT congratulations
 

Hey Nova, missed your birthday. Hope it was a good one. Happy Birthday :)

now see this is the problem: why worry about terms? why this need to slap some keyword on ourselves, as though we were searching for our souls on google? I'll tell you, I have a pet theory that the main reason we put names on our religions is so that we can easily and conveniently distinguish good people from bad people ('good people' we can threaten with divine punishment, and they take it seriously; 'bad people' don't, and need to be converted, avoided, or killed). when you come to understand that everyone is good, then the whole idea of calling yourself a 'this' or a 'that' seems faintly ludicrous.

just think of me as a gnosy bastard, and leave it at that... ;)

so (if I may paraphrase): 'the truth is that there are no truths, so eventually (when we grow up) we see that all we know is what we've already (always) known.'

hmm...

people experiment, yes, mostly because we are attracted to novelty. and when the novelty wears thin and we get tired of experimenting, we find ourselves left with an unruly jumble of accumulated thoughts and experiences. some people (as you did) box them all away and return to their original beliefs, richer for the experience. some people take that jumble and organize it into something new and heartfelt, their old beliefs inevitably thrown into the mix in some way. and some few (more than you think, really) find the thread that runs through the whole mess, and then the jumble - old beliefs and new alike - falls away and leaves them free.

discussions like this are often Rorchachs; your own experience projected on the world as an inviolate truth. and that's perfect, so long as you understand it for what it is. :o

That reminds of some graffiti I once saw in a public restroom:

"Reality is for those who can’t handle drugs." ;)

At 70 one adapts the point of view that any birthday is better than the alternative! :D. My grandmother, long ago now, used to say "I'll enjoy life for as long as I'm looking down at the grass". Thanks for the good wishes, although I can't imagine how you knew when my birthday was.

"...take two 'shrooms and call me in the morning." ;)

As for mind blowing, let's hear it for threads that go from Macs to Religion to Drugs... Which reminds me that I need to go grab my glowing shrooms background of the web somewhere, I've been missing that one...

Well, according to some pundits Macs are a religion.
Others, however, insist that it’s merely a drug. ;)

What we may agree on, however, is that Windows is a depressant.
And that Vista, in certain cases, may be classified as virtually a catatonic agent. In some particularly susceptible persons, however, it’s been known to induce violent, anti-technological rages.

Steve Ballmer is reported to have been playing with a Beta version of Vista shortly before his famous song-and-dance. You know: the one that required hospital treatment for ripped vocal chords...