No replies? I am disappointed to not be able to read what my fellow ex-BKs think, or ponder to this great question that defined our #1 core belief as a BK. Maybe the style of my first post seemed a bit aggressive. The aggression is towards the question and our old ‘programmed’ answer not to any potential answers ex-BKs may post.
This is a question long debated by philosophers and scientists and the answer is of course not one that can be answered indefinitely easily or even pondered easily. There is an overload of speculations by thinkers that we have access to in our age of information overload, but it’s the discussion and open-minded pondering that helps makes us move forward, IMHO.
Last night as I lay in bed, before thinking ‘OK, tomorrow I will definitely change the sheets’ (the whole changing the bedding once a week is a little too much for an ex-BK as myself to manage) a thought crept into my mind in that state inbetween falling asleep and sleep. This famous state where great insights have been known to come.
‘Who are you?’. I answered, “I am a child of this world. A child of its chaos and destruction. A child of its beauty and miracles. The great majesty and its primal horrors and putridness”.
I think about this this morning some more and do give most value to my own new world view of things when they are based on empirical information. We look around us on this world and see such natural destructions that wipes out millions in a single tectonic plate move. We also see a majestic cosmic awesome beauty in nature, both in the non sentient and sentient world.
In our life time our closes genetic relative, those monkeys, have also been observed and put on film for all of us to see. We can see how our primal brain would probably act without the interference of our human cerebral cortex. I have learned a lot about human's primal urges by watching how animals behave in the wild on Nat Geo and Discovery.
We learn from the brain scientists and doctors that it’s the release of brain drugs that so possesses us to act on these primal urges. We know from behavioral conditioning and how a proper upbringing or ‘spiritual transformations’ can control and subdue these primal urges that for the animals are essential for the survival of their species.
IMO, history is not 100% reliable but it does give us great food for thought and, from good sources, can provide us with great insight into the psychology of human behavior and its attempt to master it self in this beautiful and horrible world. Religion is much less reliable in its empirical data as it is filled with people’s perspectives under the influence of one thing or another.
This is the most I can ‘know’, at least at where I am today. I have done past life regression and the lives I saw, I have used my form of dream analysis to find deep symbolic meaning in its archetypes. The past lives I saw also could’ve actually occurred but I don’t think I can ‘know’, they may well have been just great insightful communication which came from my subconscious. The before and after of life I cannot ‘know’, all I can ‘know’ is what I am in this life.
This is just a start to a much broader discussion, and no doubt what you think is just as valid as what anyone else thinks, so share, ramble, enlighten us on who you are today.