> Tadeusz Niwinski wrote:
> KMO wrote
> >Would you mind giving an example of a specific situation
> > where your heroine may apply this theory in real life?
>
> Suppose our heroine is a staunch materialist, but she recognizes that
> she's too up-tight and that it's not good for her health or for her
> personal life. She decides to take up the practice of meditation. Her
> instructor tells her that she needs to chanel kundalini energy
> throughout her body in a certain way to activate her various chakras and
> attune them in some prescribed fashion. Our materialist hero doesn't
> think that there is any such thing as kundalini energy or chakras, but
> she has good reason to believe that she will benefit from this kind of
> meditation, so she visualizes the things her instructor tells her to
> visualize, and after a while she can actually "feel" the energy coursing
> through her body. It would be pretty tough, if not impossible to focus
> her concentration sufficiently to acheive her meditative goals if she
> had to keep saying to herself, "Okay, I'm just pretending this stuff is
> real in order to reap the benefits of meditative practice. Even though
> I feel it, I know that there is a physiological basis for it." She
> could do that in conversation or in moments of normal introspection, but
> there will be times when she just treats kundalini energy and chakras as
> if they were real and drops all rationalization for doing so. When
> she's meditating, she uses a different conceptual framework than she
> does in other activities, and she doesn't get too worked up with worries
> about how all her frameworks could be 'true' if they are incompatible
> with one another.
>
> Take care. -KMO
I consider myself an atheist pagan for reasons very similar to the
situation postulated in this example; while I don't believe in the literal
existence of personal gods, I find them very useful and compelling
metaphors to use in shaping my own will to an idea or task. Does that
make me Level 3, or does it just make me UU?
Eva