Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

I've always found it interesting that we techies generally avoid reinventing the wheel in our work but feel compelled to reinvent it in matters of spiritually. We're not the first to experience these thoughts and feelings and certainly won't be the last.

I suspect much of the reason is that the users manuals and wikis that resulted from thousands of years of human wonderings have been so misunderstood and misappropriated for other purposes.

This post reminded me of the ancient Hebrew book of Koheleth, which was translated into the Greek Ecclesiastes. About a man who wondered about many of the same things Paul brought up. Like many of us, Koheleth tried all sort of strategies to find meaning and be happy: to be rich, to be learned, to have fun, etc.

In the end, all he could surmise was that each day was a gift and to make the most of it. Pretty good lesson, I think. Thanks, Paul, for the reminder.

View on HN

It's not limited to techies. This is something each of us experience in ourselves, our own sacred journey.

I've talked with a lot of people -- many, non-techies -- that, with that first flowering, all tread through the same paths. They may express it differently. I did the same. It feels original because it is original, even though it has been said in other ways many times.

No book, no art, no music can take you on this journey. It's not code you copy and execute in some other person's brain. Yet once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere, as people imperfectly try to express the ineffable. It seems like reinventing, but eventually, it isn't. You cannot experience unconditional love without being in the present moment; when you start thinking in terms of reinventing things in the past or the future, you are no longer present. How can it possibly be anything other than original when it can only unfold in the here and now?

A different teacher, from a very different path (martial arts) said, "endless variations, never surprising."

It's not limited to techies. This is something each of us experience in ourselves, our own sacred journey.

It's not limited to techies...but, to put it in techie terms:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...

:-)

HA!

(But yes ;-) )

For even a more ancient story, I recommend summerian Gilgamesh. the first literature text arguably. it especially relates to the startup founders.

Does the part when Enkidu and Gilgamesh head out to kill Humbaba relate to fundraising or starting a company with two founders? :)

Spirituality is very often a personal expression, and as such deserves to be reinvented individually to the extent each individual wishes to. Even then, the vast majority of us call APIs and include libraries with varying levels of strictness and freely fork existing repositories. Is it really so different after all?

// Submit pull request #5602 to apostlepaul/Christianity.

"Spirituality is very often a personal expression, and as such deserves to be reinvented individually to the extent each individual wishes to."

I've mentioned this before on HN, but I tend to take the view that spirituality isn't something vague or abstract, but rather it's something that's fairly concrete to the point of being almost measurable. My working definition is that spirituality is basically the sum total of all your relationships. That is, your relationship with yourself, with others, your work, the food you eat, your religious practices, etc. And I would define spiritual experiences as those that have implications relating to these relationships or otherwise prompt one to reevaluate them.

That's fairly similar definition to the definition that Wikipedia gives, but I think mine is a little more actionable and also more understandable to those without any sort of academic training in religious studies.

Spirituality is in the here and now.

It goes way beyond your relationship with yourself, with others, your work, the food you eat, your religious practices, etc. It's being in the present moment and experiencing how all those other relationships fall out of it. None of those relationship matter if you chase after them, forgetting the present moment.

Academic training does not help you experience here-and-now.

"Spirituality is in the here and now."

For what it's worth, I see that as being one specific piece of advice with regards to your relationship with time. That is sort of the traditional spiritual path of buddhism, but others might legitimately think differently, e.g. those who find solace in the canon of western lit.

I used to think that way too. Western traditions have this teaching, it is not limited to "Buddhism". This is not a solace, this is practice. It is only in the here-and-now you can experience the spiritual teachings you've learned, so is fundamental to everything you do.

That's interesting, if also a bit antiseptic. I think trying to describe spirituality in such a bracketed, mathematical way is a smidge like trying to describe an emotion with an equation.

It doesn't describe what spirituality means to oneself -- which, from person to person, can mean many different things.

After all, isn't spirituality really all about personal meaning?

I think his version of spirituality is measuring how well one is interacting and absorbing everything in reality - and reacting to make those interactions better for themselves and everyone else.

I like it, sounds like Alan Watts/absurdism/I shouldn't have slept in philosophy class.

Refreshing indeed to see a hacker talk about faith.

I was talking to a friend the other day that said the Devil had internet from the start; but it's only now that we see blogs pop up on faith. So thank you Paul for this.

Also, being the top post on HN is just the push I needed to write on my faith. Was initially afraid that it'd turn my readership away. So thank you once again for teaching me to not hold back.

As an Engineer, I'm finding that faith and logic can go hand-in-hand after all. The more I question my faith, the stronger it gets.

I'm also reminded of Dostoevsky's search. Who am I to argue with a Great Thinker who spent years arguing against God's existence only to admit he was wrong in the end.

Your logic doesn't stand up here. Why should you trust dostoyevsky's subjective understanding of god anymore than your own? Besides, dostoyevsky's best asset was his imagination, not his capacity for logic.

> but it's only now that we see blogs pop up on faith

I'm not sure what "now" you're referring to, but blogs on faith have existed for a very long time now. By relativistic Internet measure, anyways.

I read Scott Aaronson's article on religious rules of interference the other day, and I guess he nailed it: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=232

What he says is that for religious people, rules of logic and interference only have to applied a limited number of times. So they never arrive at the contradictions their logic really has.

He also says that this mode of thinking is actually default for most people and also works in most cases. So I suppose you can still be an engineer, as long as you are lucky enough to have only projects that are solvable with the "just compute a limited number of steps" rule.

> I'm finding that faith and logic can go hand-in-hand after all

Well, sure, since they are mutually exclusive.

Given the huge amount of disagreement in this thread and in the world, about what religion one should have, it is more than a little ridiculous to imply that people who don't swallow some dogma whole are 'reinventing the wheel.'

I don't accept your implication that it is bad to think for yourself. What kind of spiritual life are you living if you are only repeating what other people say rather than actively engaging with the subject?

You're putting words in his mouth. Having an awareness of what others have said or thought in the past is not incompatible with thinking for yourself. There may not be much value in repeating what other people say, but there often is value in hearing it.

When I was younger, I used to hear this "thinking for yourself" phrase from a number of friends who genuinely believed they were on the path to personal freedom because they "thought for themselves"... It sounds like a sign of true independence for the man who "thinks for himself", but what does that really mean?

As I grew in maturity I realized the foolishness of that statement, because nobody truly "thinks for themselves". Sure, we're using our own brain to enact a decision unique to ourselves, but the vast complexities of how we are influenced by others and our own past - through parents, family, friends, actions (or inaction), stories, the books we've read, the movies/TV we watch, the music lyrics we listen to (I could go on) - really means that our decision-making is heavily skewed by the influences we have consciously, or otherwise, allowed to shape our minds. It really makes you wonder how much we can truly "think for ourselves"

Once I realized the notion that "thinking for myself" is really just a fantasy, I started to understand the importance of the old phrase "GIGO" and how important it is to choose (as best as possible) who will influence my thought processes. With that said, I think it's more than wise to look to masters in every arena of life for wisdom and influence to help us to "think for ourselves" when the time for choice arrives.

Ah, but then you have to choose which masters to be influenced by.

Sorry, you can't get yourself out of the picture.

Anyway, I disagree with your premise. Sure, we are subject to many influences. And probably, very few people stop to consider and analyze those influences, to decide how much weight to give each. But it is possible to do that -- and to the extent you do, you are indeed thinking for yourself.

Hmm, think this through a bit more. When you have been influenced on a subconscious level, you aren't aware that you have been influenced. If you aren't even aware to know it's happened, how can you possibly analyze and weight it? How much of your day do you genuinely believe you spend consciously evaluating every piece of information that stimulates your neurons? There's all sorts of information your brain is vacuuming up during the day which flies right under the conscious "radar". In fact I would argue the majority of information intake is completely stealth to our conscious awareness.

The fact is, this sort of influential unawareness happens on a major scale throughout the majority of childhood and adolescence, which is when much of our deepest neurological programming happens -- especially in the "critical period" of childhood development. In this period, all of our neurological processes and decision-making are deeply and richly influenced by others, on a level that we don't even have the capacity to understand.

This isn't some new concept, time and time again experiments have proven that the individual capacity for self-delusion is high and our individual capacity to reason objectively about ourselves is limited. After all, that's why we often look to others we trust when we want objective feedback.

So how much do we really "think for ourselves"? Is it 50%? Doubtful. 1%? .01%? Whatever it is, our decision-making processes have already been thoroughly influenced by many things BUT ourselves over the course of our life. You might think you are picking a particular course of action because of a produced set of rationalizations, but maybe it's really just how your parents used to behave around you as a child. Either way, we can't know for sure, which results in all sorts of objective & analytical blind spots.

Sure, I'll honor the fact that we do ultimately empower a decision, but how much of that choice to act is truly "us" is something that's questionable... as such, I think the best thing we can do is maximize the time we are shaped by positive influences that stimulate our brains and minimize the time we are shaped by garbage.

I'm sorry but IMHO you've missed the point. With spiritual understanding, it's the means that count, not the ends. Only through experience and reflection can spiritual understanding be attained. What you call a mere "reinvention" is the creation of something unique. To you, the product appears superficially similar to other spiritual products, so you are happy to equate them.

But the author's spiritual understanding is indeed unique. It's not simply an affirmation of the primacy of unconditional love, but also an explicit rejection of any other spiritual motive. I haven't read Ecclesiastes, but from your depiction, it only partially addresses the first part of the piece. "Making the most of your day" neither says anything about what positively constitutes "most" (to the author, "most" is the result of acting with unconditional love), nor what negatively constitutes "most" (killing for God, etc).

Indeed it's important to remember to make the most of your day, but for the author, it's equally important to frame impulses that disregard unconditional love as wrong. The fact that he took the time to express this point indicates to me that he doesn't believe it to be broadly held. Thus the piece also represents social comment, far beyond a mere reinvention of something.

Take a look at the Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley - pulls together a lot of these historical thoughts but focuses on people/texts that haven't become so popular they've lost meaning or been misappropriated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com