lausten:
Zoran Josipovic answered this really well in the link I provided with Brian Greene recently. To religion, he says, “God is simultaneously transcendent and imminent in all things.” So, he has looked in to why we believe that and found we have a sense of self, our consciousness AND we have awareness that operates independently, without needing a conscious thought to make it be aware, it doesn’t interpret, it’s like a mirror. Awareness doesn’t recognize itself directly. He concludes, “So it experiences itself as a subject who is having experience and so from that perspective spirituality and spiritual beliefs are our consciousness trying to find itself.”
I like it. But it’s actually deeper, more phenomenological than the transcendence the religious have in mind. The raw desire not to cease to exist, to snuff out in oblivion, not to die oxymoronically as if we’d never been.