So, I've always been drawn to the idea of giving up everything and living in a religious community. More specifically, the Order of St. Augustine. I'm just curious, has anyone else here ever had such ideas? Ever dream what it would be like to lay aside everything you have, and give your life to helping others?
Yes. I walked away from everything to live on a kibbutz in Israel, then an Ashram in India. Formal service to others wasn't what I was looking for, but feeling compassion was what I found. But doing this is not as straightforward as it might seem. It can easily become something you just do, because it's who you think you are, and what you get from doing it makes you feel good. But there's another way to see things. Instead of just helping, doing, assisting, I came to understand that some things must be left to the individual to choose to do for themselves. I began to realise that what I was doing wasn't ever really for them, it was more about me learning to discover who I am. Once I realised this I walked away from that life. Probably not quite the response you were looking for.
Religion, together with governments, education and media are part of the control of mankind. Religion in particular is designed to teach heavenly rewards for obeying rules. The vow of poverty is my favourite. Why would you deliberately want to be poor? The universe is abundant. Can't you help others without having to give up everything? If anything it would be easier to help others with the resources? What a great G-d that encourages you to be poor. My G-d is merciful, loving, caring. Not mean. We live in a world that is designed to make us feel as we are never complete enough. Too fat, too thin, your job, your car, your house. You are defined by what you own and what you own is never enough. Giving up everything is the polar opposite.
To me, the whole idea of pursuing a spiritual path all relates to that^....Giving up possessions that you value can show you that you place a high value on material objects. I dont think people need to give up all their belongings just to learn that lesson though....also, there are a myriad of ways to help others without doing that. In the end, the Middle Way is best. Some people find it neccesary to experience extremes before that can be realized. A monastic life would be a simpler way to live...but you can achieve that on your own....because where ever you go...there you are anyway...! Its all about discovering and building the person you want to be...no matter where you are.
There is a thing called universal law, and that is don't cause and harm or loss to anyone. That is all you need. Religion is just another form of control, deep rooted into manufactured core belief systems.
The universe is abundant, absolutely. But man is greedy and selfish. Giving up everything you have to help others is a way of showing others that you're meeting them where they are at, instead of just giving a fraction of yourself and feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. That's what I think God was aiming for. He doesn't want us to make ourselves feel better by giving "10 cents a day" or any of that other crud you see on TV. He wants us to give of ourselves like Christ gave of himself. At least, that's what I think. You say your God is "merciful, loving, caring, not mean". How? What I get from your post is that you believe God wouldn't ask you to give everything up. That would be 'mean'. If I'm wrong, please, explain it to me.
yes. i don't know of any, it can't really be anything but buddhism taoism or jainism since i don't believe in god
I'm waiting for my school's Temple to be built and I will most likely live there as a monastic. I can't say I will for sure, have to gain some certain knowledge first, and often people are trying to just run away from life as their true motive, so I just have to wait until I've become Illuminated (different from enlightened/gnosis) so that I know what my actual "destiny" that I planned for this life is. It's basically Crowley's "true will" or "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Gaurdian Angel".
School as in like Mystery School lol, not like University. I don't call it an Order because it's not really an Order, school is a more proper term for it. The closest thing would be the Eleusinian Mysteries but not specifically that, it's an Egyptian/Greek lineage of Theurgy going back about 3000 years. Also just so you don't get the wrong idea if anyone googles Theurgy, Theurgy is sort of like a western yoga, the preparation for Theurgy Proper is all meditation and what not to purify the body and awaken the latent faculties in order that one can perform the more ritual aspects of Theurgy like evocation/invocation, the creative word (kabbalah), alchemy, or just the priest path which is more devotional, all of which has the intention of Union with God as it's end goal.
Recently I've been toying with the idea of becoming a Rabbi. Hasidic Rabbis are different in that their positions as Rabbi are pretty much a day-long affair, whereas Orthodox Rabbis still maintain a job outside of Temple. That's the closest to monastic life a Jew can get nowadays.
I believe mankind to be inherently good and that by giving up everything in an attempt to connect with someone is foolish. By that logic if I were to do voluntary work with amputees, I would have to cut off an arm or a leg to better connect with them. Out of those 10 cents only about 27% reaches it's intended targets. It's shameful, there is a lot of profiteering going on. I would rather give $5 a month to a homeless person, that way they get 100% of it. Being kind, tollerant, caring, understanding, and loving to all does not cost money. What the Christ taught is deliberately not in the Bible. What you should be getting from that is that G-d wouldn't ask me to give up everything as that would be stupid but also that defining myself by my possessions is just as stupid.
How has this worked out for you? I'm not saying man is inherently evil either. I'm saying man is born neutral. He is also complex. Greed is the natural outcome of intelligence. The ability to understand that we want what someone else has is our undoing. We cannot have everything. Either we have intelligence, but we bring greed with it, or we have a utopia, but we lose intelligence. Incidentally, the only real societies that have had any level of success in changing the balance have been monastic communities.
It works out well thank you. Greed is not the natural outcome of intelligence, in fact you will find it is quite the opposite. The media, together with religion and education, grooms you to believe that you are never good enough. Yes we can have everything, we can all have everything. 1% of the population is holding 99% of the wealth. They shifted from one polarity to the other.
Personally I've never saw the point in giving up possessions and going out to help people. You can help more people from the top than the bottom.
But when you finally make it to the top, remembering, or even being able, to look all the way to the bottom and see it as it is, becomes almost impossible.
Well there's a lot of rich people who run charitable foundations that would disagree and have probably helped more people than a monk.
Some 'rich' people just run foundations as a tax break! The point is, wanting to get to the top may very well stop you from being able to see what's now at the bottom.
Money doesn't help people. It provides them with stuff, but it doesn't teach them how to be happy with what they've got or what they acquire. It removes the focus from helping people to a material focus of "charity." Charity doesn't help people. People help people. Rich people don't want there to be any other rich people too. It would make them poorer, so instead of teaching people how to support themselves, they create a dependency through charity and hand outs, which doesn't make the people any better off as far as self sufficiency and feeding their families in the long run, which is going to be what makes them happy. This is also why the state welfare systems in the US fail to help people. They create a dependency on the state because the state doesn't want to spend the time and human resources on teaching people to be self-sufficient. They'd rather create a perpetual system with rich bureaucrats.