Greetings Ayinde,

and you are quite right in expecting that you words will more than likely leap back towards you at some point.

Which is part of my general reluctance to discuss this issue at all. Like yourself I am generally unwilling to use terms like god or jah because they giverise to far too many misconceptions. But in certain circumstances, such as this one, they are a convenient shorthand.

That fact that we have different interpretations is of no surprise to me. I have never met any two people with precisely corresponding definitions of the ultimate nature of reality, even when they come from almost identical social and cultural backgrounds. That we would totally agree given that we come from vastly different places physically, culturally, and by virtue of our lived experience is to be expected.

And I dont think that this acts to invalidate anything. While I belive that at an ultimate level reality is, well, reality, at the level of its perception our individualtiy will always colour its experience. And I wouldnt have it otherwise.

I would take some slight issue with your analogy of water reticulation, though I am grateful for your efforts at finding such a 'town-planner friendly' metaphor. I am not so sure of it being a case of turning anything on or off, I think that the fundamental reality of the universe is always turned on, so to speak. To me it is more a case of learning what to recognise, and of re-organising our beautifully plastic minds to be able to embrace ever greter levels of perception. I have always been struck by the zen insistance that enlightenment is nothing out of the ordinary, that the truth is as plain as the nose on your face. The most difficult problems are always the ones where the answer is stupidly obvious, after the fact of course.

You asked, I believe importantly, about the place held by personal experience. I dont honestly believe that there is any other means of experiencing the truth. Some of my original misgivings about what I though you meant in your original post were based on my thinking that you believed truth could somehow be transfered from one person to another. I think that people can truky help one another along the way, and that a good many of the people that i admire in the spiritual sense seem to have a knack for picking the right thing to say and do to break the final straw of resistance to experiencing truth, but in the end the expereince HAS to be a personal one. In fact if it wasnt for my own personal experiences I wouldnt even be having this conversation. The scientific/ rationalist/ skeptical training that I have would have long ago blotted out any yearning for the way that I have a long tiome ago if it wasnt for the occasional touches of the 'other/more/transcendant' that have come my way.

Once again I give thanks for this reasoning,

love and life
paul