reason vs faith vs reality

[wandering soul]

For instance, having "God" as an inner sounding board probably has no direct correlate. Your greater self, unconscious and conscious mind included, gives a more inclusive view than the conscious mind alone can access. But that is far from omniscient and I sure don't think it is infallible. "Prayer", insofar as it is a focused opening to received wisdom, can probably be accounted for as a communion with the unconscious mind/greater self. But there is enough loss to account for some regret. But the upside is you are moving toward maturity/truth/clarity. So good enough.

That's a start. But today we're doing our postponed taxes. (Major yuck!)

hope your taxes went well!

Actually reading this I think you did precisely digest and re-incorporate the important points from your earlier thought structures into your larger more effective reality structures.

When a human eats the muscle and fat of a cow, it is not the cow that is incorporated into the human but the protein and in particular the amino acids which are incorporated and made into human protein, muscle, fat, or just converted into energy.

Thus you have taken the basis of the previous ideas (rather than the ideas themselves) and re-envisioned them in the context that is now more meaningful to you.

I love your idea of the "greater self" with different levels of conscious engagement and of purposeful agency. Have you given any thought to Jung's collective unconscious. Have you done any mental exercises to delve into your personal unconscious?

Back in the 1980s I spent a couple of years in intensive dream recording. When I turned my mind to remembering my dreams I found I was flooded with dreams all night. I found them to often be symbolic representations of the issues I was facing. And dealing with the issues in dreams affected how I dealt them when awake. In reading about the function and role of dreams I found that among other things (such as processing the information experienced during the day and sorting it into long-term and short-term memory based on emotional response, or rehearsing survival skills - in the case of humans that would mean social skills) dreams could be the working of the unconscious on the same things that the conscious mind is working on during wakefulness.

In your context, augmenting your conscious experience of life with the alternative perspectives of the unconscious provides a wider scope for engagement with life and thinking about life, the universe and everything. And opening yourself to listen to the unconscious (by whatever means) serves the same function as opening the mind to the divine. After all is prayer really about actually speaking to God or is it about being open to receive whatever beneficial comes to us from whatever source.