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There’s nothing inconceivable about what isn’t there, and so it’s called the greater or the underlying or the essential or the absolute. It can easily be called any of these easy things, but it can’t be called inconceivable because it isn’t there. There’s nothing more inconceivable than what’s...

Herumph! Herumph! Why, a tiff among scholars! Charlotte, bring me my pipe & slippers, we’re in for a long evening! Seriously, I didn’t mean to offend. I was merely expressing an opinion, which is hardly binding on anyone else – though I was probably a little inept in the expession. As for...

The thesis you’ve quoted while cogently constructed is very very old news. The point at issue is not these kinds of distinctions between mother religion and father religion, which have long been pretty obvious, but the ideological or personal agendas of the individuals who point these...

Shouldn’t we say that rather than “discarding” our personalities we learn to experience them in all their paradoxical reality, transparent to Reality, if you like, but still there because the absolute/nirvana is finally interdependent with the relative/samsara? Didn't Nagarjuna say there is not...

(I hope you agree!) that we’re mostly in agreement here, following pretty much all traditions: that God (Reality) is by definition unattainable, cannot be produced by anything we do, and so necessitates a total receptivity, stripping down, not-doing, spiritual poverty, nakedness, surrender...

I’m not sure of your point, but I guess here I would try to distinguish between “fact” (what is the case) from concepts of “subject” and “object”, which have to do with our relationship to fact. Subjective states are not objects since by definition they can only be fully known by subjects. So...

Hi Amergin. May I suggest a kinder & gentler way to say these things? Your central point I think is that the Christian Bible is a work of fiction. Fair enough, but it follows that you should read it as such, i.e., not literally, and keeping in mind that any work of fiction is open to...

Hi Thomas Sure, that’s why I was careful to make the distinction between all these contingent yeses and the non-dual reality beyond. The “yes of one’s being” is something else altogether. We get to that special case of “yes” through (or against) our various thought systems. My pluralist point...

This concept would appear to address the same One/many, God/man riddle that appears in many traditions, and like the Christian trinity expresses the problem as a fundamental mystery. Now later Buddhism in a parallel way posits the total interdependence of nirvana/samsara, the absolute and the...

Hi Thomas This problem did occur to me while I was writing this post. I don’t think it is (or should be) simply a matter of technique, or that there is a simple distinction between eastern technique and western grace. In Japanese Pureland Buddhism for example there is the distinction between...

This is certainly one of the keeper verses. But our contrasting perspectives have already been repeatedly hashed out. Only a post or two above I effectively acknowledge that the Biblical God, whether in the Jewish or Christian reading, is enlisted on the side of the oppressed. I think we would...

I started to get into a whole windy rigamorole on this but realized I’d just end up in the same commonplaces, so I’m gonna try to boil my blather down to a couple of quick points: - Negative theology and cognate language from other traditions is at base [in]distinguishable from [in]numerable...

These comparisons I think are always tricky once we get into the details. First problem is that all the basic elements are usually present in all traditions. Take the idea of divine sanction for human affairs. The ancient Chinese had their “mandate of heaven”, pre-modern Europe had its “divine...

Hi Thomas. I think it depends on how one is drawing these parallels and to what purpose. You can point to simple homology and say that “shruti” (or “the heard” those Vedic writings considered of first authority, underlying “smriti” or the “remembered”, the later legal writings, histories...

Hi Shawn. I don't disagree. Let me add a few quick points: - It’s not that “religion” whether as institution or concept has any special value in itself. It’s just that in our present condition it provides one of the few contexts wherein we can talk about what really matters – life...

Of course “revelation” itself is not a universal concept but is native to Abrahamic faiths. My sense as you know is that we need to wrestle not just with extrinsic but also intrinsic difficulties in religion, i.e., it’s not just the way people use texts but also the texts themselves. These...

In the perambulations of our tottering, febrile & felonious prestidigitations, undertaken as avatars of undertakers in surreptitious nods to clods of ready earth & readier worms, we follow in fright & delight the ultimate One bereft of all seconds but sliding & slipping unending minutes & hours...

Point taken. But I think I stand only partially corrected. In that, to return to the original dichotomy, the “special relationship” of Christians consists in the gospel of love/mystery, and as I’ve said several times I’m certainly in favor of that. But I also maintain that the distortions of the...

Hi BB. Just like old times! And just like old times we return to similar points of divergence. It’s to be hoped that each time we dissolve at least some portion of misunderstanding. But this ideology/theology stress point has always been a crux hasn’t it? So far we’ve come close but perhaps...

That would certainly apply to the more rigorously non-dual approaches, like that of Shankara, which many in the West have found most congenial because most “philosophic”. But of course in India there have been many different ways of putting the relation. My personal bias is that I go almost all...