There are hundreds and hundreds of threads I don’t participate in at all. And there are my quotes and my music threads. And my threads relating specifically to determinism and language and morality and identity.
If my posts don’t thrill you or expand your mind, don’t read them.
You clearly don’t grasp the points I am trying to convey here. And that’s fine. Move on to others. After all, no one at ILP is required to read or to respond to my posts. Nor me to theirs.
A person posts something that he/she thinks is important.
And it gets dismissed as a “general description”, “intellectual contraption”, “spiritual contraption”, etc.
Then he/she is told what he/she is really supposed to be doing … “bringing it down to earth”, discussing a context, demonstrating things for everyone and talking about morality, salvation and an afterlife.
You misunderstood, as Phyllo has now clarified… I am referring to the threads that you do participate in, not each and every thread on here.
On the contrary, I do enjoy your posts, but enough of your preconceived context of parameters already. Samsara much? A discussion is being had, you reset it with your terms, it starts again, you reset it with your terms again… the cycle never ends… how mean of you Iam.
You keep inviting people to have a respectful and civilized discussion with you … KT, Felix, Zinnat …
Then as soon as those people post something, you blow it off as a “general description” or “contraption”.
And you only want talk about your interests and it has to discussed in your particular way.
It’s not hard to explain why people don’t want to talk to you any more.
And the only reason that I’m talking to you now is because when Felix posted something about “the Way” that was on topic, you jumped in dismissively. I thought that I would try to get you to see what you are doing once again.
This seems to be the last post about Buddhism. I’m assuming that the Buddhist quote is related to thinking a lot about Buddhism - treating it as an academic issue - as being less effective than observing the way. Presumably the less common use of ‘observe’ - 3 : to celebrate or solemnize (something, such as a ceremony or festival) in a customary or accepted way. More to participate in the proper (according to practice) way.
If Jesus is talking about the same dichotomy is hard to know.
is more like Kantian analysis then the kinds of assertions and posited entities asserted in either the OT or the NT. Deduced abstract principles vs. directly posited deity.
My point is not that they can’t possibly mean the same thing as each other, but I see little reason to believe it. Different practices that engage different parts of the brain, personification vs. non-personification, quite different relations between masters and disciples (especially in Zen), different descriptions, different metaphors and in my experience master practitioner groups with rather different priorities around emotions, interpersonal relations, the role or morality, conceptions of the afterlife (if any) and more.
I look for the esoteric unity in the perennial wisdom found in traditional cultures.
“Swingroom” is wise when dealing with a metaphor for Ultimate Reality which isn’t strictly reducible to human concepts.
Shaku apparently didn’t share Tolstoy’s pacifism. Neither do most Christians. Does that rule out the possibility of a divine spark within them? Not for me.
The center of the anti-ontological bias of biblical religion is its personalism. The religions out of which mysticism arose in India, China, Persia and Europe are personalistic. They have personal gods who are worshiped even if it is recognized that beyond them there is a transpersonal one the ground and abyss of everything personal. Likewise esoteric Christianity.
Shaku, who I don’t doubt was a fallible human (like me) and one of a very different cultural milieu than mine, also said “if God exists he must be felt. If he is love, it must be experienced and become the fact of one’s inmost life.” I affirm that.
But this is heart knowledge not head knowledge. Pascal: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” Which takes us back to the quotations of Buddha and Jesus regarding simplicity and pureness of heart.
In keeping with Taoism and Jungian psychology I seek to balance head and heart knowledge.
Well, given the abstract nature of many religious quotes you will find it.
Though there’s no reason to hedge your bets. Metaphors state that X is Y. If you want to be cautious you could pick a similie.
I don’t know where this came from. I never said anything like his non-pacifism meant he or others don’t have divine sparks. Not that it matters but I’m not a pacifist myself, so I don’t think of not being one negatively. It just ain’t so Jesuslike. Which, again, does not necessarily at all mean it is negative. Shaku certainly could find justification in the OT as many Christians do. The OT in not very mystical. You got a God calling for war. But this was Jesus being compared with.
Its personalism is part of its ontology.
Some esoteric Christianity
Though Shaku was engaging in extremely head language. Extremely, hence my comparison wth Kant. And the hedging bets swingroom of what he said was not hearty either. That was an intellectual being cautious and extremely logical, though at an extreme level of abstraction.
Sure, and then there’s the gut, which from a scientific viewpoint has a mass of neurons as the heart does, from various traditions carries other ways of knowing/being/doing/perceiving from both the heart and mind.
My sense of the disconnnection between the various spiritual traditions is not based mainly on head, it first comes from the brute obvious felt differences between the practices, adherents and masters. Then one can go to the texts and find more differences to settle the mind or upper chakras down since there is so much guilt and fear around the idea that they might not all be the same path with the same ends. But I’ll leave this here since that gut facet is something underneath words.
