/lit/ - Literature

>>20551458
If you try to talk to people about the Gnostic tractates and how they rather plausibly present a perennial philosophy and portrayal of Christ as a Gnostic sage teaching people about the unity of their individual self with God, the self-conscious understanding and realization of which is attained through gnosis, a teaching quite organically consistent with Buddhist, Hindu, Hermetic and Neoplatonic teachings about how the divine sparks of our souls have become entrapped in a blind, sleeping, material slumber, the divine Nous having become entranced by its own creation of the material universe, and how this attempted democratization of spiritual knowledge through Christ was corrupted by false worldly archontic entities like the Roman Catholic Church, the Whore of Babylon, they will get rather worried and think it’s “some sort of Satanic New Age thing denying Christ’s unique and central Divinity and trying to get me to believe in some heretical perennial mysticism which blasphemously holds we can achieve theosis without strict and rigorous adherence to my time-and-society-bound interpretation of Christianity.”

If you point out that both Hindu and Buddhist teachings seem to be approaching a same fundamental truth of non-duality and liberation from suffering but simply from opposing poles (perhaps one pole or the other being more amenable to people of different cultures or types of psychological conditioning, and hence both traditions ultimately necessary in the grand scheme of things), the Hindus with the focus on affirmation of Sat, Being, as the fundamental dictum that all Sat, Being, Is One Being, which is also your own individual being, and the Buddhists on the opposing pole focusing on Sunyata, Emptiness, holding that All, being a interdependent whole, is essentially void of an independent self-nature as a “supremely Objective Object” you can point to as a Distinct Defined Unique Thing and name and define and give characteristics of as such — and do we not find that the later Buddhists, such as the Mahayana Buddhists, had to have recourse to a quasi-Vedantic philosophy of being through their teachings about a Buddha-nature which all sentient beings have, the Buddha being no different from all sentient beings and all sentient beings being no different from a Buddha, most people will just blank out.

If you talk about this, even the Guenon-conditioned Traditionalists tending to revere Indian Hindu metaphysics and tradition more than Buddhist-style philosophy and insights, will get rather confused and maybe even argumentative. “Is my own individual self in accordance with Shankaracharya’s conception of the Atman being one with Brahman, or is it in accordance with the Mahayana Buddhist conception that it does not exist as a separate unique individual distinct self at all, being emptiness (sunyata), or even a Buddha-nature? Which one is it, really? What is ‘myself’?”