> Anyways, religion has a way of setting standards
> that only some have the ability to meet. This
> self-empowers the egos for those who are capable
> of meeting the standards and subsequently results
> in individuals feeling, "I must be right". Whether
> they are "right" or not is irrelevant: they could
> be right or wrong. The important thing is that they
> have a sense of "being right" and as a result lose
> humility. "No humility" leaves little or no room for
> grace.

> jfez...@googlemail.com wrote:

>> If you look at a flower without any thought of what it is, then it
>> tells you what it is, wordlessly. You simply let the flower be what it
>> is so it can reveal itself to you. If you then ask the serious
>> question 'what is it?' then you have lost it. Because then you are
>> asking thoughts to tell you what it is but thoughts can't tell you
>> that. That's the trick that the mind pulls in getting us to believe
>> that thoughts have any underlying meaning to them. Thoughts don't have
>> any meaning to them so they can't get to any answer that has any
>> meaning. Real meaning is in the experience itself.
>> When we read complex descriptions of what someone says is their
>> experience the words immediately form ideas in our mind of what they
>> are trying to describe. So we try and understand what they are
>> describing through an idea and see if our experience matches up to it.
>> But there's no way that experience can match up to an idea. We end up
>> holding a description in our mind of what the right experience should
>> be and try to get to that. That's not going to work because by trying
>> to get to the idea we have of what the right experience should be we ...