Non-duality

wil said:
While i understand nothing ... it seems a separate self creating and illusion...seems separtate from itself...or dual? (runs back behind drapes to watch)
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words create duality
 
Thomas said:
No, I'd say belief is a conviction first and foremost.

This conviction might be arrived at through the operation of the mental faculty, but that is extremely rare. C.S. Lewis is a prime example of such, but generally, man is a voluntive creature rather than an intellective creature.


Yes. The only authentic experience is in and of the practice.

Those who pursue a religion for a 'religious experience' (specifically the sensory consciousness of the numinous) are really barking up the wrong tree.

It's why I'm generally suspicious of the phrase "I'm spiritual, but not religious". As well as inferring an explicit duality, there is in the terms themselves an inherent contradiction: any mode of 'spirituality' is ontologically informed by its parent religion. In the Orthodox Christian world, the two are synonymous. Too often 'spiritual' people speak of religion in a subjective and pejorative manner, generally ignorant of what right religion is, but amply armed with the evidence (as they see it) of what's wrong. No-one eschews science on the basis that it gave us nuclear weapons. The commonly-held idea that 'religion has caused more wars' etc., has been rendered void in the last century by the Reich, Stalin, Pol Pot, et al. It hardly bodes well for the claim to esoteric insight when they cannot objectively discern the exoteric.

I think the idea of a 'spiritual experience' has become rather distorted by filtering ideas from the Asian continent through a goal- and object-oriented western mindset. Anyone declaring a spiritual life usually declares some order of 'enlightenment', an elevated and kind of supra-aesthetic appreciation of 'the one-ness of everything'. I'm rather of the opinion that's largely irrelevant to the discussion of religion.

In the same way the mystics — the Rumis, the Eckharts, etc., are held up as the paragons of religious 'experience', as if they are the goal of religious endeavour. It's a complete distortion of what authentic religious practice is. Eckhart, for example, never claimed any order of 'experience' whatsoever. And the claim that he thought 'outside the box' is a nonsense in the face of the tradition for which he speaks (have they read Aquinas or Bonaventure or Albert the Great, I wonder), and the fact is that Eckhart spent a good many years disciplining the Medieval equivalent of "New Age" mysticisms!


Pure Christianity.

To approach that, we need look at where duality comes from.

The following is distilled from a long article by David Bentley Hart, as I think he has a lot of useful stuff to say.

The great Indo-European mythos, from which Western culture sprang, was chiefly one of sacrifice. It saw the cosmos as a closed hierarchical system, with the gods on top of the mountain, with angels/demigods, heroes, free men and slaves arrayed on its slopes in descending order.

The engagement between gods and mortals was fundamentally strife-ridden, a transactions with death in which man was the plaything of seemingly callous and often capricious gods in whom was personified the callousness and caprice of nature.

The terrible dynamism of the gods/nature was resisted and rationalised within the cults, recuperating their sacrificial expenditures in the form of divine favours.

Judaism, at its very inception, had the chance to break with the old regime. The God of Abraham demanded total fidelity, and Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son to that end. But the sacrifice was refused. It should have ended there, but instead a 'providential' ram found stuck in a bush, and offered instead. But how can a chance find be any demonstration of fidelity?

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Certainly the mythos did not always express itself in slaughter. Early religious expression included fertility festivals, for example, and the celebration of the passage of the dead, but they were all underwritten by the idea of sacrifice.

The pervasive shadow of this mythos fell across the philosophical schools of antiquity. All the great speculative and moral systems of the pagan world were, in varying degrees, confined to this totality, a strife between order and disorder, within which a sacrificial economy held all forces in tension. This is true even of Platonism, with its inescapable adherence to dualism, its dialectic of change and the changeless (or of limit and the infinite, in modern parlance Relative and the Absolute), and its equation of truth with eidetic abstraction; the world, for all its beauty, is the realm of fallen vision, separated by a great chorismos from the realm of immutable reality. The same in the Indo myths, with their concept of purusha and prakriti, essence and substance.

It is true of Aristotle, the father of the 'categories' in which everything, the gods included, are assigned their place in the cosmic order. Stoicism offers an obvious example: a vision of the universe as a fated, eternally repeated divine and cosmic history, a world in which finite forms must constantly perish simply in order to make room for others, and which in its entirety is always consumed in a final ecpyrosis (which makes a sacrificial pyre, so to speak, of the whole universe). Neoplatonism furnishes the most poignant example, inasmuch as its monism merely inverts earlier Platonism’s dualism and only magnifies the melancholy in 'the flight of the alone to the Alone'.

The same is embedded in science. The example of the wave/particle paradox is but one.

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Only in the light of this does the shatteringly subversive message of Christianity emerge, and yet its message of love not sacrifice was voiced by Hosea eight centuries before Christ.

So, in an act to show that He requires love not sacrifice, God inverts the whole, ancient order – He sacrifices His son.

"Now is the judgment of this world, now will the prince of this world be cast out", says Christ in John's Gospel (12:31). "I have overcome the world" (16:33).

Nowhere is the vastness of meaning of the Passion more evident than in the rending of the veil of the temple.

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Naturally, also, with the death of the old mythos, metaphysics too was transformed. In every ancient system of philosophy this world is a reflection of the other, Christian theology taught from the first that the world was God’s creature in the most radically ontological sense – called from nothingness, not out of any need on God’s part, but by grace. The world adds nothing to the being of God, and so nothing need be sacrificed for His glory or sustenance. In a sense, God and world alike were liberated from the fetters of necessity; God could be accorded His true transcendence and the world its true character as divine gift – a theophany.

The full implications of this is embedded in the Council of Chalcedon, and the four 'Chalcedonian adverbs' — that Christ comprises two natures in Himself, God and the world, "without confusion, without change, without division," and, most tellingly, "without separation". God and the world as two, as distinct, but a single totality.

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Christian ride the world of the old gods, amd modernity seeks to ride the world of Christianity.

The only cult that can truly thrive in the aftermath of Christianity is a service of the self; the cult of the of the impulses of the will, of the nothingness that is all that the withdrawal of Christianity leaves behind.

Modern men and women believe in nothing. This is not to say, we do not believe in anything concretely or absolutely; everything is negotiable. Everything depends upon my viewpoint, my narrative. The world is as I write it.

We live in an age whose moral value is determined to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean. We live in the embrace of Hollywood (who's promethean apetite is now coming into the spotlight), in the embrace of the 'counter-culture' of the 60s and the abasement of every transcendent value in its catchphrase, 'tune in, turn on, drop out'.

Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy one’s unborn child are all equally intrinsically 'good' because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

This is not to say that — sentimental barbarians that we are — we do not still invite moral and religious constraints upon our actions. Thus this man may elect not to buy a particular vehicle because he considers himself an environmentalist; or this woman may choose not to have an abortion feels wrong about terminating 'it'. He may support this or that good cause, she may argue for this or that natural right.

But this merely illustrates the point: we take as given the individual’s right not merely to obey or defy the moral law, but to choose which moral standards to adopt, which values to uphold, which fashion of piety to wear and with what accessories.

And the same our custom-fitted spiritualities, notable for their rose-tinted view of antiquity, plunder the old order, be it dream catchers of native North American religions, the yogas of the Indian subcontinent, some Pre-Raphaelite grove shrouded in Celtic twilight, all purveyed as so much glittering but otherwise worthless quartz, dressed with pages drawn at random from Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, 'or that redoubtable old Aryan', Joseph Campbell.

Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Gnosticism, all the trappings of the "New Age", occult, pantheist, "Wiccan", or what have you — all have reverted to a duality of this world and that, of the chasm between the world and the spiritual, between, as they see it, religion and spirituality'. The modern religions, whose burlesque gods command neither reverence, nor dread, nor love, nor belief; they are no more than the masks worn by that same spontaneity of will that is the one unrivalled demiurge who rules this age and alone bids its spirits come and go.
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words create duality.
 
Bhagwan said:
words create duality.
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And where do words arise?

As soon as any creature becomes self-aware, or self-reflective, duality is inevitable.

All religious endeavour is, in some degree, an attempt to overcome that distinction, but really its part of the wiring of the faculty, it's there before any activity, so it's an attempt to overcome one's own nature, or the nature of nature ...

If we were actually 'one with' the the cosmos, with no filters, no 'this-and-that', we would be overwhelmed and incapacitated by the inflow of data, the system would crash, so filters are necessary and without them we couldn't function.

So the idea of 'one-ness' is always contingent, always relative, always relational ... or so it increasingly seems to me.
 
Thomas said:
If we were actually 'one with' the the cosmos, with no filters, no 'this-and-that', we would be overwhelmed and incapacitated by the inflow of data, the system would crash, so filters are necessary and without them we couldn't function.
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That's exactly what happens in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna honors Arjuna's request to see him (God) as he actually appears. Complete sensory overload.
 
Is not a stone One-with-the-Universe?

In-animate objects never offer objections.
In-animate objects are always at peace and neutral and without sin.

There is no crashing over-load for a stone.

What Arjuna felt at peace with was having Krishna's person at his side.

Krishna's form of Universal omnipresence is a vast cosmic ocean of impersonal machinery.
 
Thomas said:
anthropomorph
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Where (or what) is the anthropomorph ?
What is the original anthropomorph ?

Is the defacto purpose of the universe (so far) to evolve anthropomorphs ?

Will the real anthropomorph please stand up?

Anthropomorph are predicated on a Transcendent Param-morph?

To anthropomorph or not to anthropomorph...

Buddha say no more anthropomorph.

Live life to its fullest anthropomorph while you can!




From Latin creatūra.

criatura f (plural criatures)
  1. creature (living being, especially an animal)
  2. small child, infant
    Synonyms: infant
  1. creature, beast
  2. person
Synonyms
 
anima

from Latin anima(“a current of air, wind, air, breath, the vital principle, life, soul”), sometimes equivalent to animus(“mind”), both fromProto-Indo-European*h₂enh₁-(“to breathe, blow”); see animus. Cognate with Ancient Greekάνεμος(ánemos, “wind”), Old Englishanda(“anger, envy, zeal”). More at onde.

The soul or animating principle of a living thing

anima (accusative singular animan, plural animaj, accusative plural animajn)

  1. of the soul; spiritual mind, mental, psychological, inner quotations ▼
    Ĝi staras antaŭ miaj animaj okuloj.
    I can see it with my mind’s eye.
    anima lukto / ekvilibro
    inner struggle / balance
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

LOL ... A lot of anthropomorphising here in this one word?:

First declension.
Case Singular Plural
nominative anima animae
genitive animae animārum
dative animae animīs
accusative animam animās
ablative animā animīs
vocative anima animae
 
Hi Bhaktajan II —

You haven't really addressed the issue — all I was suggesting in response to your:
Bhaktajan II said:
Is not a stone One-with-the-Universe?
In-animate objects never offer objections.
In-animate objects are always at peace and neutral and without sin.
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was that inanimate objects cannot offer 'objections'

The definition you offer of anima rules out stones having senses or feelings — they lack life as we define it.

Bhaktajan II said:
There is no crashing over-load for a stone.
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Quite. There can't be, as the stone has no receptive faculty to overload.
 
Sir Thomas, I am in agreement.

My point was the contra-indication(s) [don't know the right word here].

I am referencing the Nirvana state that is sought by what 'we' call impersonalist or sunya-vadi or maya-vadi and/or the Advaitists.

They are actively seeking a state that makes a stone look like concrete reality. They seek extinction.

In our Theistic monasteries the first rule for a novice/child/student/seeker is to understand that:
We are spirit souls in the material world. We must first know, We are not the body, We are spirit souls.

And of course the Gita explains the nature and position of the soul....from there the rest of Yoga, dharma and liberation etc is pursued predicated on that first lesson: We are not the body, We are spirit souls.

Those seeking Nirvana as a state of extinction aka merging into void/become void ---ignores lessons given in the Gita as rudimentary.
 
Thomas said:
And where do words arise?

As soon as any creature becomes self-aware, or self-reflective, duality is inevitable.

All religious endeavour is, in some degree, an attempt to overcome that distinction, but really its part of the wiring of the faculty, it's there before any activity, so it's an attempt to overcome one's own nature, or the nature of nature ...

If we were actually 'one with' the the cosmos, with no filters, no 'this-and-that', we would be overwhelmed and incapacitated by the inflow of data, the system would crash, so filters are necessary and without them we couldn't function.

So the idea of 'one-ness' is always contingent, always relative, always relational ... or so it increasingly seems to me.[/QUOTE
YOU are awareness,thought says,your a person thats aware.there isnt awareness and you,everything is awareness
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How many times have we heard of a foreign Language that "doesn't have a word for ____"?

Some milieus don't have need to express certain concepts. They're outfitted with words they need and use and all the rest is unknown to them.

DYK:
The native Hawaiian alphabet consists of thirteen letters: five vowels and eight consonants.
 
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