Believers vs. Seekers

Creativity Poetry & Quotes
#1

I was driving yesterday when I had a thought.

The religion of my parents has Believers

With my spirituality I am a Seeker

What can we infer from this?

Keep in mind I have always felt judged, persecuted, and looked down on by people whose faith aligns with my parents. I have also had a number of conflicts with my parents on this matter. One of the more recent being my mother telling me that the world is ending soon, and it’s sad that I don’t care that I am going to hell. This is a comparative 7/10 for their track record here.

#2

Drat, I should have put this in spirits path.

#3

[QUOTE=Rdlagrand;71595]I was driving yesterday when I had a thought.

The religion of my parents has Believers

With my spirituality I am a Seeker

What can we infer from this?

Keep in mind I have always felt judged, persecuted, and looked down on by people whose faith aligns with my parents. I have also had a number of conflicts with my parents on this matter. One of the more recent being my mother telling me that the world is ending soon, and it’s sad that I don’t care that I am going to hell. This is a comparative 7/10 for their track record here.[/QUOTE]

As a seeker are we not satisfy with the answers we seek? Or is our question not understood? If so…then perhaps we need not to believe! We are not alone in this path we walk, but as for the truth it’s stands not on how or what we believe is truth.

#4

I wouldn’t be too quick to take yourself completely out of the category of believer. By virtue of being a seeker, you apparently believe that there is something beyond this mundane existence. The difference between you and your parents is that they have faith that they have found the answers to questions of life, mortality, and spirituality while you do not.

I would say that the defining characteristic of a believer is faith, i.e. a belief in the truth of something even in the absence of concrete evidence to support it. Even many seekers ultimately resort to faith, though they may believe differently than they were taught to believe by their parents.

#5

So would a believer be a person satisfied with the truths they have collected, and a seeker a person whose thirst for spiritual knowledge is insatiable?

If a seeker is also a believer then is he/she a square and a rectangle while a believer is just a rectangle but not a square?

#6

As Asuri put it, believing is refusing to seek further and seeking is believing no more. If one goes beyond the human need to divide and classify in order to understand, a believer begins with seeking and then gives up. A seeker begins with believing and then questions it.

We believe all the time, whether seeking or not. Our sensory perception, limited as it is, demands belief just to cope with the unknown component of the world around. We believe in standing firm, when earth’ s solid crust is less than 0.554% of the liquid mass on which it floats; we believe in standing still when we are on earth’s merry-go-round at a good speed of 467 meters per second; we believe in living (forever) in spite of people dying around us all the time; we believe that there is a thing called sky while no thing exists; and we believe in horizon that is hypothetical.

Believing per se is not a problem, not seeking is. Without a belief there is no beginning, no hypothesis to test and validate. Not believing in anything makes seeking a shot in the dark and groping in vain.

#7

I’m not a big fan of placing people into neat little boxes. That is only a conception that does not necessarily conform to reality. Maybe it would be helpful to examine this concept of the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Is that always superior to someone who feels satisfied with their beliefs? I’m not sure that having to constantly drink but never having ones thirst quenched is necessarily a happy situation. Is it that there are no good answers, or that there must always be more questions? Or is it that you have not sufficiently defined what it is that you are seeking? An attachment to knowledge is an attachment like any other that ultimately has to be overcome.

#8

I agree we are all believers in something. The believers vs non believers dichotomy is a false dichotomy that is usually used to pit scientists and atheists against followers of religions, but the truth is even scientists and atheists are believers in something. Scientists for example believe in atoms, dark energy, black holes, space, time, matter. Atheists believe in the non-existence of god and the supernatural(usually)

In Yoga speak a belief is a vritti or modification of the mind that either belongs to correct knowledge, incorrect knowledge or fantasy, but ultimately all vrittis of the mind are not absolute knowledge, but concepts, even something factual like, “The earth goes around the sun” or “Here is a chair” or “My name is Surya” is in fact just a modification in the mind, which we eventually have to dissolve.

It is interesting to note how Yoga sees no real difference between beliefs, facts and fantasies. They are all just modifications of the same field of mind, and ultimately all of them are undesirable and need to be overcome. Thus it is already implied that a seeker already has beliefs that need to be overcome eventually.

#9

[QUOTE=Rdlagrand;71595]I was driving yesterday when I had a thought.

The religion of my parents has Believers

With my spirituality I am a Seeker

What can we infer from this?

Keep in mind I have always felt judged, persecuted, and looked down on by people whose faith aligns with my parents. I have also had a number of conflicts with my parents on this matter. One of the more recent being my mother telling me that the world is ending soon, and it’s sad that I don’t care that I am going to hell. This is a comparative 7/10 for their track record here.[/QUOTE]

Beliefs are the relative conditions and manifestations of the likes/dislikes of the mind, 7 billion human minds generate 7 billion relative human beliefs. Truth is not relative, else it could not be Truth, therefore anything that changes is an illusion; I am born, I live and I die?born, live and die are changing but ?I? is the constant ?Truth?. Seeking outwardly in the illusion is fruitless??What can we infer from this?? inquire the ?I?, for Truth.

#10

Always being thirsty for water would be awful.

Always being thirsty for knowledge is wonderful.

Spirituality, to me, is a sort of science. Just as biology gave rise to chemistry so too does spirituality progress. The more you know, the more you have the build upon. The more you have to build upon, the more questions you find.

“One months, two months, one year, two years, ten years. No use. Whole life. Whole life is practice.” -Patabhi Jois

Ray, have you meditated on tracing the origin of the first time you thought “I?” I have read 'A Search in Secret India" and was quite interested but I am still waiting to complete Om.

#11

Well said.

#12

Always being thirsty for knowledge is wonderful.

But is it, and what do you mean by knowledge? Do you meaning reading tons of books on philosophy, religion, science, history, literature, art and crafts? If you do, then I definitely disagree with you that one should be thirsty for this kind of knowledge. It fills your mind with tons of information, information that you eventually are going to have to bin in your practice. The more you study, the more you will have to unlearn in the end. Ultimately, the aim is to awaken your own intuitive knowledge(Prajnana) which Patanjali says is always better than even the best book knowledge. As book knowledge is always riddled with doubt, error, prejudice, conditioning and limitation and it burdens your consciousness.

Any kind of thirst is an indication that something is needed to quench something inside. It is definitely not desirable to be always thirsty for anything. Thirst is only an indication that something needs to be quenched, and until it is not quenched, one will remain in a state of craving(Pain!) Thirst for knowledge is not an end in itself, but it a means to quenching something inside us. What is that? The answer is we need direction. We need to know who am ‘I’, where am ‘I’, where am ‘I’ going, how am ‘I’ going to get there. Once the answers comes, we have no more need for knowledge. Then we simply practice with absolute conviction and certainty. In the same way one travels the route on a map with absolute conviction and certainty.

#13

[QUOTE=Rdlagrand;71764]Ray, have you meditated on tracing the origin of the first time you thought “I?” I have read 'A Search in Secret India" and was quite interested but I am still waiting to complete Om.[/QUOTE]

Whenever the opportunity I explore the ?I AM?.