That question "Do you believe in God?"
In matters of the soul, only that which you already know can be explained to you. This is the opposite of most material knowledge where you know most things because they have been explained to you. It is not really "knowing" in that case, it is a narrative with a probabilistic level of certainty.
Belief is appropriate for rational systems.
I believe that the earth goes around the sun although I haven't seen it myself. It is because I have been seeing the evidence since primary school. Theories based on that assertion work, the math holds and predictions come true. At this point I am 99.9999% sure that the earth goes around the sun. One could add a few more nines to that. Of course one can never believe anything absolutely.
It works the same way for Western legal systems where evidence is collected and connected to each other, and at a certain point, the balance of probability tips and you can start believing that a certain thing happened a certain way.
But matters of the soul are experiential and once a thing is known, it cannot be refuted or not known. And who am I to say that what I have experienced myself is not real? I may not understand it which is why I rely on the men and women who have experienced the same things, were humble enough to let it into consciousness and articulate enough to put them in words to the extent possible.
So there are two different systems - the way of Logos that is rational and wants to create order out of chaos and that of Eros which seeks a direct connection to reality. Things go wrong when approaches that are suitable for one system are applied to the other. There are no absolutes in the material world, so it is wrong to insist that one particular way or belief or mode of action is absolute or right. It is equally inappropriate to search for or hold experiential truths through belief.
However it is also wrong to deal with the external world purely through rationality and the external world purely through experience.
Logos and all its fruits have to be derived directly from our subjective experience and observation of reality. It fails and turns tyrannical when it loses this link to Eros.
Eros, on the other hand cannot develop without Logos because it needs a container. Otherwise it has no integrity and no structure - matters of direct objective experience also need to be ordered and explained. Without this link to Logos, it will just dissipate as emotion. The mistake would be would be to seek only rational reductive explanations for these insights which are revealed to us, as and when they are.
This is most beautifully depicted in the Yin-Yang symbol.
What is more fascinating than the two halves, one white and one black, is that the opposite function exists at the center of each. The core of each is made of the other.
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