Jeffrey Davis

Thanks to Einstein Quote of the Day, a new gadget on my iGoogle homepage, there will be a good fair amount of posts containing some of his quotes coming your way. Here’s one for ya:

“The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.”
~Albert Einstein

Something I love about Einstein is that though he was an utter genius, he constantly alluded to the importance of metaphysical concepts that transcend the intellect.

To be one of the most brilliant people to have ever walked the planet, and to realize that such a thing is actually of little importance, is truly brilliant.

Technorati Tags: Einstein, quotes, Jeffrey Davis

What do you think we’ll experience when we die? What is it that you hope we experience when we die? Most “christians” these days expect to meet with the be-all, end-all, Great and Powerful Oz-like figure that is the singular totality of God.

References such as, “we’ll finally see His face“, “falling into his arms“, etc, are evidence of such expectation. For the record, I too have believed such a thing for the majority of my life. Now, however, I wonder if such will be the case.

Let me explain.

I’m totally in love with my wife. She is my best friend (among other things ) and the person who I’d rather be with than anyone else. I believe that we are becoming one person–that the line between where Jeffrey ends and Shaunna begins is continually being blurred.

That of course, is something that occurs spiritually. Obviously, we are and will always be two different people, physically. Now don’t get me wrong, the physical container that houses Shaunna is WONDERFULLY BEAUTIFUL, but that which I most deeply love in her transcends this physical reality.

If that is true of the love I feel for my wife, then why have I believed the inverse of God?

You see, with the longing for the “Great and Powerful Oz” experience when I die, I subconsciously fall prey to the belief that the fullness of God resides in a physical representation of his infinitude–not the vastness of his entirety–which is what already indwells you, me, and every other person on the planet.

I currently believe that the life/breath/spirit/whatever of God indwells us all–some are aware of it, some are not. In other words, like me and my wife, we are one.

If the be-all, end-all of God that I experience when I die were a physical singularity, I now suspect that a crippling realization would ensue: that the spiritual oneness I had experienced in life was bull shit and make believe.

It would be like realizing that all there is to Shaunna is her physical person and all that I love beyond that is mere fabrication.

Obviously, we long for a person-to-person like experience with all that is God upon death because we have only physical interaction with other humans to liken it to. But why else do we desire that? Is it logical? Is it real?

What do you desire to experience when you die?

Technorati Tags: God, love, spirituality, Jeffrey Davis

oh the hymns of angels
suffer over the stench of the 21st century
nothing is black or white
or devoid of industry
the face of monotony
the litany of popular culture
i face the microphone and fumble in my pockets for a change
a break from the deranged world of…
plotting out the death of art
and i went over the edge of the world
and felt the sting of all it’s words
i sang the song of elves and  birds
i saw you in my rear view shades
and drank from pools of night time cafes
i stopped over to finish up
i turned the knob and called your bluff
i went over the edge of the world
i face the microphone and fumble in my pockets for a change
a break from the deranged world of…
plotting out the death of art

*Interesting Note*: a line of gibberish follows the twice-used line of “a break from the deranged world of…”, hence the ellipsis. The missing/hidden/encrypted lyrics are NOT detailed in the CD jacket and are actually three words recorded backwards.

Decoded, the missing phrase is “accountants and record executives”. Put it all together, and the accusation is that the deranged world of accountants and record executives are plotting out the death of true art. Quite a bold claim, don’t you think? It seems obvious as to why those few words are encrypted.

care to take a stab at that artist?

what does that monologue say to you?

What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and realized that everything you’d believed and constructed your entire life on wasn’t entirely true?

Would it change the way you lived? Would your entire world come crashing down around you? Would you feel betrayed by those who led you into those beliefs in the first place?

For many of us in the western world, the answers to those questions would be “yes”…but is that evidence of an erroneous paradigm all together?

Most of us today have been brought up in a foundationalist paradigm. Foundationalism is just like what it sounds. It is any epistemology (theory of knowledge) that has a foundation of basic beliefs on which all other beliefs are completely dependent.

The potential problem therein is the possibility of a faulty foundation. If we realize that one (or more) of our foundational beliefs is faulty, the structure on top has no choice but to fall.

Doesn’t leave much room for growth, does it? Perhaps you’ve sub-, semi-, or fully-conciously felt like you’re captive to your own beliefs…this could be the reason.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimension.” But alas, when our feet are firmly set in the stone of our hardened belief system, such a stretch is not only impossible, but wholly inconceivable.

It is true, a foundational argument will generally always lead to Agrippa’s Trilemma, ending in either “an infinite regress, dogmatic stopping point, or a circular argument”.

What then might a solution be? Is there still a way to hold a few core beliefs without the rest of them being dependent on them? What would the benefits and drawbacks of such a paradigm include?

Technorati Tags: foundationalism, philosophy, spirituality, Jeffrey Davis