The advantage of believing in a God is that you have someone to talk to.
The problem with believing in a God is that you have someone to talk to.
The words are thus pronounced and the impulses of the heart find their way.
©FJ July 2022 —
Groupe de Pratique
Recueils — Participations
Notes & Silence 
I am unsure that there is advantage or disadvantage.
Belief either is or is not, and, either way, is temporary, liable to change, and subject to desires we scarce recognise or admit.
The atheist believes he is not disadvantaged; quite the opposite. So believes the theist. Perhaps the agnostic’s (and I refuse to engage in silly arguments over whether agnosticism is actually atheism) is the only intellectually honest approach.
There is, to my mind, clear disadvantage in religion, in faith, in doctrine, as there is in any prison cell.
Be that as it may, I must conclude that any god worthy of the term has no need of our conversation, and any person who needs a conversation can talk to himself with greater assurance of a response. The words and impulses will find their expression either way.
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I think I was referring to differences between dual and non dual spiritual approaches.
first term : If you have someone to talk to, you’re safe from the pitfalls of non dual approaches, i.e., ending up trapped in an egotic drift, but you may still be caught in mirroring games and detours of projections
Second term : If you have no one to talk to, as in non dual spheres, and are not properly guided, whatever that may mean, by the way, you increase the probability thereof.
Sorry, this is not even close to being clear.
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I’m bouncing back from another comment you made : so you DO have sitting sessions.
I’d really be curious to read more about those, here or elsewhere, now or some other day.
If I were asked the same, though, I really wouldn’t know what to say,
Certainly because there’s not much to be said.
Dogen himself, the most volubile writer I’ve heard of, wrote less that 10 lines to describe practice.
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I do join you on the stupidity of the positioning injunction people have towards agnostics.
In agnosticism, there is space.
in certainty, lies ego knots and self-preaching assertions.
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Sitting practice?
I sit. I stand. I walk. Rarely, I might even run, though not for long.
My « practice » is my musing, regardless of posture. It is me, however I am positioned. Impressions that appear when everyday nonsense is put aside. It needs no position, action or adjective.
Not sitting, standing, or otherwise doing. Just being.
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It is me, « However I am positioned. »
It is, « however I am positioned ».
Sitting is to practice what emergency brake is to braking.
It is nice to have one and know how to use the system.
Though, in itself, it is not necessary to run a train.
I’d say that when no other ‘lighter’ practice is accessible, sitting forces, in a way, stillness to manifest.
Can we think of sitting as a hack into practice ?
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You can think of it if that is how it works for you.
I am increasingly unsure that « practice » is not a deceptive term. Are you not your practice? How do you distinguish one part of yourself, one action, one state, from another? Are you not a whole, a « being »? Is not your « hack » into practice to recognise this?
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Yes, the word ‘practice’, like any word, is an approximation, a convention.
Practice is just what you do.
If what you do is sit,
Then, you can talk about a sitting practice.
there are all those things that you do without doing them.
this is not practice.
This is you, in the lobby of practice.
Mindfulness, while extremely over-used and twisted in its contemporary use,
remains a good manner to refer to the activation of practice. A ‘practice ON’ mode »
To paraphrase the famous sutra :
Practice is not practice,
This is why I call it practice.
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