An Update

I find that I have two natures within my conscious experience: A shadow nature, and a true and real nature.

Truth is within my heart, yet my shadow nature suppresses and obscures it.

I find that all I need to live a life of goodness and truth is within my nature. Yet, now I find that I am not interested in finding the deepest parts of myself, for I am too interested in the shadows of my complacency; in the impulses of my lower nature.

How did such a being as me come to exist? Is it possible for nature to sculpt a creature whose deepest satisfaction is to drink deeply of being itself? I can't help but turn to God as the one who makes sense of all of this mess of me. But this "turning" is proving to be massively difficult, as I have multiple questions that need answering, and along with these questions are oppressive shadows determined to drag me down to desert truth, to desert my glorious nature, to dismiss reality.

An update-- that's my life right now.

Six Important Truths

These are six of the most important things I've learned in my life so far:

1. Human experience of reality is fundamentally mental, and thus all experience of the reality is constructed by the senses and mental interpretation.

2. The human mind consists of two basic natures-- the understanding (sense, or meaning) and the passions (non-sense). All human dignity consists in the mastery of the passions by the understanding.

3. Without the literal and concrete definition of terms in our speech and thought, we do not interact with reality, but with nonsensical impressions.

4. The love of truth and understanding is the essence of virtue and goodness, for the love of truth is the love of reality and the consequential harshness towards one's nonsensical passions. To be good is to live and will the truth. So, how do you become virtuous and good? By seeing things the way they really are.

5. Truth is a cognitive-spiritual relationship with reality itself. Reality is not known-- truth does not happen in its proper form-- unless it is known intimately and tangibly. This is not just the case with God, it is the case with all things the mind relates itself to-- such as people, the natural world, historical facts, personal facts, etc. This intimate awareness of reality is the proper form of truth. 

6. A few moment's intentional and realistic thought on a matter is enough to completely change one's disposition and perspective.

Observations..

Today, I saw someone close to me in a lot of physical pain. I wasn't affected by it very much, because I couldn't fully understand it. I sat and watched, doing everything I could do-- which at the most amounted to sitting there and attempting to empathize with him so I could better help him. At the same time, I had the realization that pain in this degree exists all over the world-- and hospital services like the kind available now are not available in many parts of the world. Millions are suffering physical pain, and not to mention spiritual pain from lack of understanding.

Another reason to avoid living short-sighted.

New Hope

All of the things I have learned to be true about this world recently have cast an impression of doubt upon my  belief in God. I have found neuroscience revealing natural personality traits to be completely genetic, evolutionary theory explaining life in a very consistent and plausible manner, a loss of belief in immaterial souls (though not a belief in the contrary), my beliefs about the origin of the natural world contradicting scripture's account of origins, and the subsequent questioning whether scripture is a reliable and authoritative source on Christianity,  and various other inconvenient truths such as the amount of evil in the world.

But the major realization that has forced itself upon me in the past five months is that if God is, he is responsible for all of this. I have grown up in such a simplistic evangelical faith, where some of the deepest and most tearing questions are neglected by trite phrases, which are passed down as "the rule of faith" for Christians who are struggling to deal with the pressure of every-day life, raising kids, and staying alive and faithful, and do not have time to question whether the foundations of their worldview are true or not.

But God is so much bigger than this culture, this stage of history, this framework of thought we call evangelicalism, than our own human minds, and than any proposition that can be thought about him. (even this) I'm finished imposing unjustified conceptual frameworks on his character and existence.

Truth and Understanding

Truth is only upheld in the human mind by Understanding. Truth is understanding (understanding being meaning, or, logical content in the mind). But not all Understanding is a direct relation to reality itself. Sometimes it is hypothetical and idea oriented.

But at the same time, the reason we must honor understanding at all times is that if we fail to honor understanding in our minds, we therefore fail to honor truth, which makes us false and sinners.

That is why we can gain wisdom and knowledge of God from a technically false story.  It contains meaning, which honors God, and by meaning we honor God and truth. Truth is meaning, but not all meaning is truth-- (truth being literal correspondence to reality).  C.S. Lewis' Narnia series contains many states of affairs and events which, fully understood, help us to understand reality. But the events in the story themselves are not reality. They are only ideas.

By meaning, or, Understanding, we honor God. When we engage in mental events that have no meaning, such as pride, self love, lust, sloth, shame, passions etc., we dishonor meaning in our minds, and consequently dishonor God. For our only connection with God is through our Understanding of Him, and Understanding is drowned out by meaningless mindsets.

The battle of soul is not a fight between truth and falsehood, it is a battle between sense and non-sense-- and this eventually implies a fight between truth and falsehood. 

Goals and Guidelines

I haven't written on my blog in a while-- the reason for this is that I'm trying to actually say and do things with substance rather than self-seeking passion. When you realize that you wouldn't care about the things you write unless people were listening, and that you also do not think about much of what you say, you tend to get a bit quiet.

Nevertheless, just to keep any interested people updated (and I do really appreciate it that you follow my blog if you do), I'm going to briefly describe my current situation and my goals.)


First, the whole worldview decision before the summer ends thing didn't work out. I honestly felt like I didn't get very far even though I did do a lot of reading and thinking. Despite that, I find myself leaning more and more towards belief in God, simply because the spiritual disciplines I practice to keep myself acting consistently with the truth push me in that direction and I have no reason not to. This combined with the fact that there is not really any amazing evidence either way concerning the topic (though it does lean slightly towards theism in my situation) makes me more comfortable with simply believing in God and, if that belief gets corrected, so be it. So I wouldn't consider what I've done an official position so much as a pragmatic, down to earth recognition of the futility of "truly" official positions. Blaise Pascal once stated, "We have an inability to prove anything which is insurmountable by all dogmatism."

Second, this summer I experienced a revolution of spirituality. Kierkegaard's writings on the appropriation of truth turned my world around. I realized that words have meanings that relate to real things-- not abstract, intangible things. Even the most abstract, philosophical theory has real, tangible, and practical meaning to the one who formulated it. If words do not have a real, down to earth meaning, then they have no meaning at all.

This turns my life around because I had never learned to think about the things I talk about, do, or even think about. When everything I read or say or do has a real and tangible meaning, life becomes rich and full of meaning. This caused me to look back on all the things I learned in philosophy and think a lot harder about them, and it truly has spiritual ramifications.

Now, I live my life by a code which involves deep thought about things around me, people around me, and etc. It's incredibly meaningful despite the intensely hard work of reflection.

Lastly, this puts me in my current situation. I am about to start my senior year of college. These are my goals and guidelines I will hold by:

Goals:
1. To be consistent with the code I have created for myself being true to my friends, truth itself, and God.
2. To learn as much as I can through the academic disciplines at this college.
3. To maintain a high enough GPA to be accepted into profitable graduate school programs.
4. To push myself as much as I can in Cross country.

Guidelines I need to hold to:
1. Soberness. I must stay soberly reflective of all that is required of me rather than off in my baseless and meaningless emotional daydreams.
2. No dating. Still I cannot afford to be dating anyone right now. Luckily, I don't even have the desire this year, though last year I struggled a lot.
3. Resilience. Much will occur to cause me to wish to fall on my face and give up. But as I learned during the summer, and as Alfred says in Batman Begins, "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up again."
4. Spiritual and Intellectual Independence. I can't afford to be influenced by other people around me unless it is profitable-- but this means I have to critically filter everything people tell me, expect of me, or make me feel so that I can decide what is profitable and true. This is incredibly hard and I know I will fail a lot.

Spiritual Warfare

Here are some random thoughts I want to share with whoever while I ought to be doing devotions and getting ready for sleep. I hesitate, at times, at being overly personal here (and everywhere else on my blog), but this is my life and what I deal with, so that's what I'm going to write about. 

Today, after having a great conversation yesterday with my friend in which I told him that sexual struggles and lust have been dormant in my life for the past month or so, I woke up struggling with lustful thoughts in my mind. (why... Why?!?! was it because I lied or something? Or because I was getting prideful? I dunno) But anyways, I did what a smart person does and forced them out of my mind all day. But towards the end of the day as I got home and was getting exhausted I just gave in and indulged in the thoughts. 

As I was sitting and indulging in my idolatrous fancies, I attempted to bring some scripture into my mind. Something I read earlier today: "How much better it is to have wisdom than gold! and to get understanding is to be chosen over silver." I thought about it and tried to apply it to my life, to which my mind replied something to the effect of "psh. screw that! naked women are a heck of a lot more fun to think about than boring truth!". I saw my mind's point, and then unreluctantly gave up trying to dissuade myself from my sin, concluding I was already sinning anyways. Ok, I'm probably portraying myself rather more shadily than it really was. It was more like I genuinely did not want to think about this crap and and was feeling sorrow inside, but the sorrow wasn't enough to change my attitude. 

It's funny (I'm not laughing). These moments are when we are most convinced that we're too far gone for any kind of repentance and we may as well continue on with whatever sexual sin we're committing, be it sexual fantasy, pornography, masturbation,... uh, well, I'm sure there's other stuff, and then repent later.

But as I've been realizing recently, these are the moments that spiritual warfare intensifies and really begins-- the reason we don't want to see it that way is because we're sold on the pleasure and don't want to contemplate the idea of giving it up. The band "Oh, Sleeper" has really been teaching me a lot about spiritual warfare. I used to think that spiritual warfare was, well, actually I don't know what I thought it was. I just thought it was dumb because it had something to do with demons scaring you and you trying not to be scared, which seemed totally dumb to me, because if demons exist, then God probably exists, and if God exists, then we have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. (I'm not that rational, I promise. I just think I am) 

The other night I went running and listened to metal music the whole time. The band I just mentioned uses a lot of imagery of heroic sacrifice and constant devotion to what one is bound to. Whenever I run, it makes me get that feeling like, "Ah man look at me runnin' and all, I look so disciplined and hard core. I'm really fighting hard (I say this after like half a mile of running, which isn't anything really). It gives you this feeling of pride and honor exuding from yourself, but in reality it is baseless. Running at that point in my run isn't real spiritual warfare anymore than praying in the bed with the lights off and the door closed with your girlfriend is, and to pretend so is just as sinful as pretending you're really being godly by doing such a thing with someone you're not married or engaged to. 

What is real spiritual warfare then? I like to say that spiritual warfare begins when you shut up with your emotions and talking and you're truly confronted with a challenge that is going to consume your whole soul, and as you fight you gain spiritual muscle deep down. See, it's nice when I run and listen to music and feel all awesome and disciplined like that during my first mile, but when I'm more than 3/4 of the way through a 5 mile race or even a 7 mile run ; I feel my gut clenched up, my muscles aching, my throat closing up, my whole body ready to collapse on the ground, my spirit and my hope failing, literally everything I could possibly imagine working against me, that including my mischievous deceptive mind, THAT is where spiritual warfare and discipline begins. That is when it truly takes everything you've got in your soul, and that is where heroes come from. Even as I write this I find it hard to believe, because I've so trained myself that life doesn't have to include such moments. But it does. 

In my favorite song by Oh Sleeper, (it's a metal scream band by the way), the lead singer named Micah begins screaming in the middle of the song (that begins with the words "We were born to fight") something that really does punch me deep in my gut when I think about it. These are the words: "I'm sweating red; I'm sweating red, I'm sweating red. I'm red, I'm sweating red, I'm sweating red, red, red. [and so on...].  This is no light-hearted scenario. This isn't something you raise your hands and sing about. This is, of course, the scenario of Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane-- a spiritual battle with no legitimate rival. With these words, he illustrates the absolute lengths to which we ought to be willing to go to in order to uphold truth, God's law, and devotion in our life. That battle isn't over when all the fun and games and singing have stopped and the true pain and work begins; it's just beginning. 

This is actually funny: it's quite ironic how listening to this music during the first mile of my run makes me feel awesome and disciplined, while listening to it near the end of my run, I genuinely don't care about feeling awesome or any of the feelings of pride I had the first mile-- I am wholly focused on completing the challenge before me. This is the mindset I want to have. Forget the pride, forget the baseless passion. Enter into spiritual warfare as a daily battle, and see what happens.