(02-16-2016, 03:33 PM)IndigoGeminiWolf Wrote: [ -> ]What if we're wrong and irrational?
My take, for what it's worth:
we are almost certainly wrong and irrational -- at least in some important ways. So what? Who isn't?
On the "wrong" point, I think this is something we should all accept: the Confederation material is necessarily incomplete. There is no way to represent the full scope of metaphysical reality through a language designed to facilitate illusion. Each and every one of us definitely misunderstands something, and we should ensure we're keeping our own fallibility in mind. But that's not a fallibility unique to us: every human, no matter how "sketpical" or "rational" they are, has blind spots. We believe that's an important feature of our experience in incarnation, but it does affect our ability to be certain in the way most people think of certainty (and even certainty in that sense is thoroughly contingent).
After all, what qualifies as "rational"? When people say this what they usually are trying to exalt is not reason per se but
generally accepted social consensus. But that, of course, is quite a different thought complex than what the Western tradition has usually considered "reason" and "rationality". If you try to nail skeptics down on exactly what they mean when they say they or something is "rational", you'll find a bunch of tautologies and unsupported assumptions. That is because rationality--true reason--is
an attitude and methodology of how one synthesizes conclusions from starting premises. Let's be very clear:
it has absolutely nothing to say about what those starting premises can or should be. Look to the Scholastics for a great example of reason pressed into religion's service; if you start with the
fact of God and divinity, those can be processed rationally.
Now, I do think we have a special acknowledgement and appreciation for the irrational due to our emphasis on the quality of faith. This is not a con: it is an exercise in radical transparency and openness. The point being that skeptics also have faith in the model of a purely material reality in which the only things that are "real" are things that can be reproduced consistently. No philosophy that puts as much emphasis on the importance of the individual subjective experience can be expected to reduce all value and truth to the lowest common denominator. And indeed: the fact that the scientific method and its philosophical moorings have become a quasi-religious world view is a testament to the fact that we're not the only ones with faith.
The L/L group strives for accuracy and transparency in the process of channeling this information. But there's no "peer review" or critique culture, and we accept that these matters are significantly subjective and imprecise. It just so happens that the information transmitted through these channels has a consistency to it that we recognize as an (imperfect) indicator of some kind of accuracy. I think we'd all agree that within these parameters we get a lot of value out of this.
But we should never forget that we are asking the questions that this process is adapted to address. If others ask other questions, or if they have other criteria for judging information, then we should expect the outcome for that person to be different. We should not expect our subjective insights and truths to convey to somebody who's, say, of the scientific materialist skepticist persuasion. What have we to offer those preoccupied with the transient? Very little.
Keep in mind that much of what is expressed by Confederation sources is a view of our manifest reality from the unmanifest point of view, from time/space, from a viewpoint that is very difficult to make functional use of in the illusion. It would not be healthy to expect people who don't recognize these models of reality to accept this information, anymore than it would be healthy for them to expect us to renounce all of this information because we can't reproduce its insights in a double-blind experiment.
Finally, the Confederation sources always ask us to use our own discernment and disregard ideas we find a stumbling block. We should honor anybody's right to disregard all of the information, including because they find it "wrong" or "irrational". I'm learning personally to in my head follow everybody's statement of an absolute truth to me with "well, that's just your opinion, man."