/lit/ - Literature

>>21659559
>>21659647
The Rev. Thomas Merton was another modern “rock-star” spiritual figure (I use that phrase, with the quotes around it, with a sense of irony — but also with warm respect and appreciation) who heavily delved into Zen, as well as other Eastern mystical and religious traditions.

Hinduism makes more sense to be synthesized or syncretized with Christianity on the surface — they simply can admit Christ as an Avātāra of Brahman, a great saint and prophet, who indeed had the functions and status He attributed to Himself and as was attributed to Him by others.

For Buddhism, the fundamental nontheistic viewpoint ultimately becomes a sticking-point if you want to somehow “merge both” yet still have a coherent worldview, but there are some similarities which don’t have to be tortured out. The focus in Buddhism on virtues like maitri and karuna — lovingkindness, compassion, and mercy. The Tibetan tonglen practice is surprisingly “Christian”-sounding: in it, one “takes in” negativity, ill-will and malice from others with the breath, accepting it passively and understanding and forgiving them, and “gives out” this love, forgiveness, compassion and understanding with the out-breath. There’s even a commentary I read on it recently by a Tibetan tulku meditation-master where he speaks practically exactly in the same way as the “Last shall be first, and the first shall be last” of the Gospels, or “turning the other cheek” of the Sermon on the Mount, where he notes how this practice (tonglen) is a deliberately inverted and counterintuitive one from our normal thought-process, and it’s precisely in that that it’s miraculous quality lies — that anyone could even come up with it at all and get many people to practice it.

Haven’t read this one but it’s reputed to be another goldmine of that seemingly strange intersection, between Christ and Oriental religions, taking Taoism now. independently, I saw the same thing when reading translations of the Tao te Ching. All this mischievously written out explicitly and precisely to bust the chops of people who hate “New Agers,” “syncretism,” “lukewarm religious dabblers” etc., or even any mention of Eastern religions and philosophies.

>>20023526
An analogous idea is also presented by Heidegger in his “Being & Time”.

>Phenomenology is our way of access to what is to be the theme of ontology ...
Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.

Phenomenology (the study of experience) and ontology (the study of being) make up an inseparable continuum. Without an “experiencer” there would be no “experience,” and “experiencer” and “experience” in fact make up an inseparable continuum transcending the crude distinction between the “experiencer” and “experience,” as if “you” were something apart from the “reality” you experience as “something outside yourself.” “You” are not like, so to speak, a goldfish inside a fishbowl, the fishbowl being the “physical reality environment and reality outside yourself.” You are simultaneously the goldfish, the water, and the fishbowl, the undifferentiated Being manifesting throughout everything, the basic awareness which makes all this possible.

This is not the Satanic prideful idea of “Your personal ego being equivalent to God, you yourself being a god,” but entirely different from it and something to be experienced, not put in words. Meister Eckhart is also well worth reading for his insights into this same primordial philosophy or “objective knowledge.”

>The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart

Those who had the most profound realizations of this insight, became known throughout history as saints, sages, prophets, even the founders of religions like Christ and the like. However, the original knowledge which they were pointing to became subverted into “religious traditions” which had a lot of historical and cultural accretions pasted over them as a sort of distraction from these primordial teaching of self-knowledge and heightened awareness meant to perfect the unregenerate human being, instead of merely turn them into someone repeating religious phraseology and carrying out rites which are secondary to the basic Truth (“subjective knowledge” as opposed to “objective knowledge,” in Gurdjieff’s phraseology).