Age wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:14 am
This, of course, obviously excludes all of those times when we say either "I believe ..." , or, "My belief is ..." but ACTUALLY MEAN 'I do NOT KNOW, for sure'. See, we can, hypocritically, say, "I believe ...", when ACTUALLY we do NOT 'believe 'it' AT ALL.
I am not seeing it like that at all... maybe this is because I am not a native English speaker (my mother tongue is German)... but if I, for example, would state: "I believe the monkey has eaten the banana",
then my conviction behind the statement is not as strong as saying:
"The monkey has eaten the banana."
If I only assume or consider something being true, then this assumption or belief is more of an "educated guess" (meaning: an estimate based on experience or theoretical knowledge), but it's not a fact.
When I say "I believe the monkey has eaten the banana" I would have not actually observed it eating the banana, but I would have observed the banana being in the monkeys hand, and, maybe a minute later, noticed the empty banana skin lying on the ground... whereas if I would have been continually watching the monkey actually eat the banana, only then would I say: "The monkey has eaten the banana."
If I only believe the monkey has eaten the banana, someone who has actually observed the process of the monkey
not eating the banana at all, but throwing it out of the cage to get rid of an annoying/unwanted visitor (or whatever else the monkey might have done), would be able to easily convince me of my assumption/belief being false...
As such, I don't see any hypocrisy in saying "I believe xyz" without actually being perfectly convinced about the truth of the statement - it would rather be hypocritical to say "I have seen XYZ" if I actually only believe that I have seen XYZ... but that's of course just my perspective on how to use the verb "to believe".
Furthermore, one has to bear in mind, that any statement or assumption we make (or belief that we entertain about something) is ever only about a conceptual interpretation, but never about reality itself.
Saying that "The monkey has eaten the banana" is a statement about an interpretation of something that has been directly experienced - but we have to keep in mind that we never actually directly experience an "I" seeing a "monkey" eat a "banana", but all we actually ever directly experience visually is color (which is also a concept, but there is no way to verbally further reduce the direct experience of "seeing").
That this changing field of color in front of our eyes actually is "a monkey eating a banana" is an assumption (or even a "fact") about an interpretation we have come up with, which we have learned and acquired over the years (a baby, for example, has no idea that there is a monkey eating a banana, it only sees shapes of color, which have no deeper meaning at all), but these assumptions/facts can never state something absolutely true about reality itself.
Age wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:14 am
because thee One needed a way to become consciously AWARE of 'this', and EVERY thing else, it needed a species like the human one, to evolve, with the ability of the human brain to grasp, hold, and store information.
This might be the case or not... I personally don't think that reality (thee One) itself has any agenda, knowledge of right and wrong or any other kind of specific need - it doesn't need to become "consciously AWARE" as awareness/consciousness is what "thee One" already is.
I think people tend to misinterpret what it means to be "aware of something" (no matter if of self or other) - as I see it, being aware of something is always only possible when conceptual thought is involved - this so called "awareness of" is actually a "thought of/about" something. One is as such not "aware of X" but "thinking of X" - awareness itself is not "of X", but simply is (as awareness and the apparent thing it is meant to be aware of are not two, but one whole).
Age wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:14 am
Also, because thee One is the collective of EVERY thing, then ONLY when EVERY thing comes together, as One, to agree on and accept some 'thing', then that is WHEN thee One Truly 'makes decisions' or Truly KNOWS 'things'.
This might be the case or not... I personally don't think that thee One "is the collective of EVERY thing", simply because things are only conceptual interpretations, and reality is not made of such separate things - it already is "not two" and, as such, doesn't have to "come together".
The only "things" that could "come together", or rather: align, are the billions of different conceptual interpretations, assumptions and beliefs that make up human personalities, but, as I see, "hell will freeze over" before this is going to happen
Age wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 11:14 am
Furthermore, because of how the Universe ACTUALLY works there is REALLY only a NOW, so in a sense, ALL 'decision making' and 'KNOWING' is happening or occurring NOW.
I agree with "there is only now", but if one thinks about this a little bit deeper, then the following question might arise:
"How can there be any decision making if there is only now?"
If there is only now - and everything is happing "simultaneously" - then there really can be no process that would require a previous mindset or state A, the making of a decision and the outcome, a mindset or state B. These states as well as the decision would happen simultaneously (or at least: not temporally connected) - and to tell them apart, to align them temporally, one would first have to "invent" time, otherwise these so-called decisions are no decisions at all...
As I see it, decisions again only apply to assumptions we make (or beliefs that we entertain) about a conceptual interpretation of reality, but never about reality itself.
As such, thee One - reality - doesn't make any decisions - a process of decision-making happening is only an assumption/belief we entertain which, again, is based on our conventional interpretation of how reality appears to work.