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Old 04-26-2006, 01:42 PM   #137
davem
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
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davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
I know what you mean - the 'Light' behind the world - I don't dismiss mystical perception, the sense that there is more to 'reality', whether that one means an experience of a 'deeper', underlying reality, or simply a deeper experience of this reality.

But there's a difference between that kind of experience & simply 'believing' something you've been told or read. Experience is true, what we are told may or may not be. The other problem with organised belief systems is that they exclude those who do not, or cannot simply believe what they are told. In other words by their nature they exclude & denigrate those who do not experience what they are told they should experience.

So, you can have experiences where you may forget your everyday self for a time & feel like you've 'awakened' from a 'dream', yet both the awakened one & the 'dreamer' are you, so in that sense I can see where you're coming from. However, it is the 'dreamer' who is the real us in a sense (despite what the mystics say) because the 'dream' is what we live most of the time - the 'dream' is 'home'. ('We Tooks & Brandybucks cannot live too long on the heights.' - & we probably aren't meant to - Chesterton said 'One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.' The great value of this 'dream' is that it teaches us humility.)
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