Philosophy: Religion and Spirituality

Many people don't realize there is a difference between religion and spirituality. Religion often boils down to following a set of prescribed rules of dos and do nots despite what else it may say. One should not murder. One should not steal. Ask a religious person why she doesn't steal something from the store when there's no one around and she'll tell you that it's against some religious figure, divine being, or holy book's teachings. Maybe it's even all three. Whoo hoo.

That is not the case with spirituality. You don't steal when you can because you feel it within you that it's against the way of nature. Your reason is not based on prescribed formulas of right or wrong regardless of whose authority it originates from. There is no divine law you just broke. You don't commit such an action because you feel at peace within yourself when you don't do such a thing.

With every rule there is an exception and that's the problem with blindly following some religion. Holding religious tenets can make you quite a fool though you may fool yourself into thinking you're actually wise.

Case in point, a natural disaster just struck and half the town is deserted. There are looters everywhere ransacking shops and such. You go in a jewelry store and sees that there's a few diamonds and pearls in a dimly lit corner that people have missed. But you realize that as the night goes on and before help arrives, there's no way every looter will overlook it. What do you do?

If you say "God says I should not steal and other people will certainly obey this too and if not let God punish them", you just leave it where it is and go on your merry way out of the city. Shortly afterwards, some gang leader sees them and buys some more weapons and drugs with the money from selling them when things return to normal. God somehow doesn't punish him and he turns a few more kids into crackheads or gang members.

On the other hand, if you say "I'll borrow it for the time being so that other less decent people wouldn't just steal it and never give it back. I'll track down who the owner was when things return back to normal and give him or her back what's rightfully his or hers.", you'll gladly take them.

Let's just say you never manage to track down who the owner was. Was it wrong for you to steal the jewels? In that case, it depends on what you do with them. If you sell the jewels to have money for a vacation I believe so. But if you sell them to donate to a charity I believe stealing them was still good.

There are no rules that's not meant to be broken given the right circumstances. Following rules from a holy book without constant reflection on when to apply them actually makes you more foolish though you might be less selfish. Good job. You're no longer quite a selfish person seeking material gratification; instead you're now more of an idealistic fool who thinks you're actually wise. I'm sure being a fool is better than a hedonist but I'm not sure it's much of an improvement.

As another example, let me talk about Christianity in this country. I have met many Christians who are nice (though I have met a few that's not so nice but that's another topic). But there's two kinds of nice. Some of them are genuinely nice while others are religious nice. By the latter, I mean that you can tell they're only nice to you because some book they follow says so. You can sense their nice is somehow forced. If they didn't follow the book's teachings you can be sure that they wouldn't be this nice to you.

I find that very disturbing for the main reason that if so much of their actions and attitudes are determined by following those teachings, do they ever think for themselves? Or do they just reference the book or their pastor's teachings on what to do just about everytime something comes up? I really wonder how much of their actions are up to themselves to decide and how much they relegate to some book or person's teachings. Maybe this is why I find many of these religiously nice people to be a terrible bore if not merely annoying. Given any hypothetical situation, it's very predictable how they'll react. *Yawn*

There's countless other examples of how following a religion actually makes you more foolish than wise. I'll just list out a few I thought of here that's especially applicable in the states:

- Condemning the theory of evolution without understanding how scientific theories work

- Claiming abortion to be wrong regardless of the mother's circumstances

- Condeming gay people as sinners who should miraculously turn straight even though the tendency is often inherently biological

- Talking to people of other beliefs and telling them that they're definitely going to be severely punished by God if they don't convert

- Evangelizing to people who don't really need evangelizing and who's actually more spiritual than you though they don't agree with you on certain "fundamental" principles

- Believing people who can dreamwalk, dream of the future, tell the future of people, spiritually sense their surroundings, etc. to be charlatans or even worse practitioners of evil sorcery

The way to do this is not to think about by what rules or holy words should you do or not do. Instead just reflect on the consequences of an important decision on the world. By world I'm referring to the general sense of anyone or anything including yourself. If the way you take causes greater disharmony in the world in the end, don't do it. On the other hand, if it causes greater harmony or has no effect on the world, why not do it? It's always possible to follow a religion and be spiritual instead of "religious".

There is a caveat here though. I do believe that some people do need religion. Not everyone is sensitive enough to the needs of themselves, other people, or the planet's well-being. Some people are not born that way. They cannot or have a hard time feeling the pain of others. Maybe they somehow are born or have grown long accustomed to even attaining pleasure from hurting others. In these cases, I believe strictly following a religion to be a powerful means of control. The alternative can be much worse.

Literature: Smoking in Solitude

I gave my following thoughts some embellishment; in other words, I lied about certain parts to make it more interesting from a writer's perspective. Still, it is true that I often find music to be directly linked to my train of thought. I wonder if most people find that to be true as well?

Solitude is nice. I was smoking a cigarette on my front porch while waiting for the water in my pot to boil. My headphones resonated with Trinah's "Every Day" while I exhald puffs of smoke. I really don't like smoking. That's why I had to drive home first and drink some caffeine first. I didn't have coffee at home so I had to do with tea. It's close enough to the lyrics and feel of the song.

At the moment, as I'm standing there quietly with the ember of the end lighting up in front of me, there's just the feeling of this moment as part of a larger picture. I'm part of a scene frozen in time. I thought of the scene in Waking Life where Caveh Zahedi and David Jewell were talking about the holy moment. Since I used to watch the movie about every other day I guess relating life to Waking Life still comes up pretty often in my mind.

David Jewell is definitely not the greatest poet alive, I couldn't help but think. Too much pretentious repetition, I thought pretentiously. Still, some of it can be oddly catchy which is why I glance over his stuff sometimes. Like "which way. this way. that way. left way. no right way. find a bright way. and then a night way". I have no idea what it means but maybe someone can rap it.

I tried it and decided that I sounded very lame. This is better left to bling bling professionals with too much money and time on their hands.

The ends of the stick were curling up like a wounded caterpillar. I mildly flicked it and watched absent-mindedly as the ashes fell down the railway onto the first floor. There was no one there so nobody yelled at me. The primary advantage of living upstairs is that gravity is typically on your side.

Half-way there and some ways more to go before all that's left would be smoke and ashes. Once this burns up, these thoughts would be burnt up with it. This moment is not eternal which is why my life is far from being a Haruki Murakami novel. I also don't interact with cats if I can help it and there's no weird metaphysics. His novels are ridiculously annoying in its melancholy but still oddly delicious in how it twists your mind. I'll have to switch to a different song like Space Cowboy's Falling Down with the Paradiso Girls to get my mind off of cats and metaphysics. Electropop has the consistent tendency to dropkick me in the head and knock me out into the real world. Wham!

Self-improvement: Balance of Thoughts on Time

I'm listening to some R&B while sipping on some green tea. My bedroom is tranquil and despite the time of the day has a feeling of permanent lethargy. It is an amazing ambience for reflection or slacking off but a terrible ambience for doing any real work. I use this thought to comfort myself on why I'm writing this instead of doing real work.

When I drive my mind naturally wanders, like yesterday when I daydreamed an epic story in my head for a good hour or so where a god had to do evil to ultimately achieve good but the heroes stayed ignorant of that until the end. There were some amazing graphic scenes and plenty of betrayals and unnecessary deaths. Let me digress no further. Before I jumped into this golden pit of illusions, I thought of an interesting psychological theory:

"Without a balance between thoughts on the past, present, and future, one can never be happy."

The amount of time one's mind dedicates to reflecting on the past, doing the present, and dreaming for the future should be in balance. For instance, if one excessively reflects on the past, one will be stuck in the mentality of past failures or past glories. This will likely cause the person to not like the present either due to regret of events that could not be changed or the seeming reality that the past is much better than the present. They may both be true but dwelling on it too much is harmful to one's mental stability.

Similarly, if one focuses on the present which is the "just do it" mentality, one can lose oneself in the daily reality of life. Where one came from and where one's going should not be ignored since otherwise one can wake up one morning and feel lost in the world. One has lost the meaning of one's life. Lastly, if one dreams too much on the future, one ends up doing nothing useful since the mind consistently dwells on fanciful daydreams.

So how do we find this balance between these thoughts? That depends on the individual since everyone is different. A systematic approach that may work is what I've been doing lately. Simply carry a notebook around with you and carry around a phone with an alarm. Set alarms for random times during the day. When the alarm sounds, write down three things: the time, what you're thinking, and how happy you are. At end of each day, you can take a look at your notebook and see a collage of snapshots of your thoughts during the day. You can repeat this for a week and observe the consistency of your thought inclinations.

Literature: On a Blue Day

Note: Just another exercise in dramatic writing. Just to let you know that I'm honest and will never go anywhere I shouldn't be, I never did any of this. All imagined in my mind and expelled henceforth from it!

I'm not in the library for its books or its "esteemed" educational value. I'm here for it offers me an expansive solitude that I can find little of elsewhere. This was the feeling I had even before I found a key to the roof top. I was in the elevator going up.

Second floor. The only person beside me in the elevator was a short girl with a large backpack. We were in a pseudo-comfortable silence. The backpack was pink. I glanced at her shoes. They were also pink. I turned away and silently counted in my head waiting for this pink monstrosity to leave.

Fourth floor. The door opened and the eyesore thankfully departed. I quickly punched the button to close the door before anyone could get in. Not that I could see anyone waiting in front of the elevator but you could never be too careful ensuring zero disturbance.

My current mood was an unstable system and the slightest perturbation may cause it to fall into the more stable mood best described as handling reality. Rare moods have to be preserved in a state of unstable equilibrium for as long as possible. It's like taking psychedelics once in a while to connect with the universe but doing that too much will seriously impair with handling reality. But regardless these rare moods must be preserved for how else could you experience the spectrum of your mind?

Sixth floor. Philosophical musings shoved aside, my mind returned to the practicality at hand. Leaving the elevator, I surveyed the area next to the stairs. No one in sight. Climb? Yes! My internal voice had to shout.

I went up and saw a door with a keyhole. Glanced back again and saw no one. I turned the key and walked out into the sun. The roof top was empty as expected.

I chose a boring day to be up here. No clouds. Just an aimless infinite blue. No wind. Just flocks of crows or ravens flying aimlessly. A slight breeze? Probably the downwash from their wings or more likely my imagination.

I sighed and walked towards the edge. Funny how there's no guard rails. If someone falls off though, they'll be all over it with regulations and whatnot. That's the funny thing about this country. One person's carelessness instantly means everyone else has suddenly irrevocably turned stupid.

I walked along the edge. If I fall off, there may be some interesting consequences. Quick images flashed through my mind like a film fast forwarded X16. I lose my footing on my next step and I topple over the side with a yelp. Good that I already have numbers prepared in my head in case something like this happens. Every floor is ~3 meters tall. There's approximately 7 floors making it 21 meters tall. Terminal velocity for a skydiver of around my weight is about 50 m/s. Obviously, I won't reach terminal velocity but how many seconds will I have? Every second my body is gaining velocity of ~10 m/s. This means I have about two seconds to think of anything in my last moments. This approximation isn't good enough, some part of me wanted to say.

I told it to shut up. Am I really going to squander my last moments trying to resolve the time of flight before I can no longer model myself as a rigid body or point mass? That's somehow comically absurd.

Third floor. Time does slow down in your last moments. Somehow I was able to think all that and I'm still just half-way there. The windows are rushing by at an accelerated pace. No one has noticed me yet. I hear the wind howling by. Maybe I'll suddenly sprout wings and fly. Will they be a mechanical contraption or magical? I spared a moment to ponder on which one I preferred. I decided that I'll go with both for redundancy. Saving myself should be a system with no single point of failure.

First floor. Sadly, daydreaming really doesn't help with developing powers in reality. The grey ground flew towards me mercilessly. I saw two people glowing white standing close to where I was soon to land with a crunching splat. They were smiling. Are they angels?

Odd, I almost did think I saw two glowing entities down there. I blinked. There were just two students there talking. I stopped my daydreaming on the edge of the roof. I stepped back and turned around. Either I have briefly entered the twilight zone or I really needed some sleep. Either way my mood was gone and this short venture was done. I went back inside and closed the door quietly behind me.

Literature: Sky (天空)

觉得从未用中文写过诗就试了一下自己的文学：

千里旅途，停留湖静，

低头饮水，水清如镜。

云朵如羽，层层漂浮，

微风拂过，水乱云散，

一片水光，五色灿烂。

举头一望，碧空万里，

光线刺空，刻上天衢。