Bells

French Word-A-Day
Une ville sans cloche est comme un aveugle sans sa canne.
A town without a bell is like a blind man without his cane.
- Jean Fischart

And from the liner notes for The Time of Bells 2 by Steven Feld:

After twenty-five years of recording rainforest soundscapes in Papua New Guinea, I've started to listen to Europe. I'm struck by a sonic resemblance: bells stand to European time as birds do o rainforest time. Daily time, seasonal time, work time, ritual time, social time, collective time, cosmological time - all have their parallels, with rainforest birds sounding as quotidian clocks and spirit voices and European bells heralding civil, festive, and religious time.

Believing preceeds Knowing

Some thoughts regarding the book The End of Faith by Sam Harris, which I already mentioned HERE and HERE.

I am still not quite finished with the book. Either I am a slow reader or I am reading too many books at the same time. Probably a little bit of both. Well, overall I am very glad that I read the book because it gave me a lot of food for thought, but I find the author's writing a little smug and even angry. There is a lot of data and more than just a little of it seems presented with an emotionally charge, which is understandable given the subject, but not necessarily useful.

I think there are two elements to Faith. For one faith/believing is a basic default action of the brain. Faith and belief and pre-judice are all part of the same action that creates a perceived order in the brain. Order feels good to the brain and releases feel-good hormones... This default action of he brain is not a bad thing as it can save time, but it is one that needs to be questioned. Example: you walk down a street and in the distance you see a man who seems to be drunk as he is not walking in a straight line. Your brain might "believe" that the person could be a potential threat and at the very least would waste our time and suggests that we cross the street. On the other hand you could ignore that suggestion and encounter the man, and find out that he is a poet and a great guy. You might even help him call a taxi.

Simply put, believing is faster then knowing. Knowing anything takes time. Believing is like falling in love - we know nothing about a person and yet we are hopelessly in love... knowing somebody means that we have put in time. We hear a certain instrument and fall in love with it, believing that we want to learn more. Knowledge and mastery of that instrument comes from countless hours of confronting that instrument and ourselves in relation to it - years of practicing and playing.

Believing is at the beginning of the journey, not the end. From believing grows determination and practice. From practice grows mastery and knowledge. From mastery and knowledge grows understanding and compassion.

It seems to me that the problem is that too many people are happy to believe and don't move on through practice.

I am still working on these ideas and my mind is going a mile a minute connecting dots for me... I will probably update this post several times today and in the coming days...

Threes

Vic2rsBlog: The Spiritual Trinity
First, Buddha-Dharma-Sanga, simply translated: Inspiration-Process-Community, or Example-Guidelines-Empowerment. Well, it seems to me this 'trinity' must be some sort of basic spiritual truth because it can be seen everywhere. How many ways can the same 'trinity' be expressed? How about: Goal-Plan-Action, or even more basic Love-Wisdom-Power.

It is true that we see trinities everywhere and we certainly find them in many religious or spiritual teachings. But, could it be that the trinity is simply a basic reality of the brain? That this way of looking at our world might be influenced by the basic structure of our brain? This is an item on MIT News from two years ago:

While computers process information using a binary system of zeros and ones, the neuron, Liu discovered, communicates its electrical signals in trinary - utilizing not only zeros and ones, but also minus ones. This allows additional interactions to occur during processing. For instance, two signals can add together or cancel each other out, or different pieces of information can link up or try to override one another.

On the other hand - we might say that our reality, the world, is simply constructed with threes at its root and of course our brain had to be structured in the same way... Let's chew on that for a few days.

Faith

We are terrified of our creaturely insignificance, and much of what we do with our lives is a rather transparent attempt to keep this fear at bay.

The End of Faith - Sam Harris