/lit/ - Literature

Here’s a list of theologians, philosophers, and mystics who I believe back up this view (I have not even come close to deeply reading these thinkers but put down all their names because they in some way, through quotes or reading about them from secondary sources, contribute directly to this Christian “bhedabheda” view)
All of the individuals in this list have either been explicitly or implicitly accepted by the modern Church or have seriously influenced its philosophy in a meaningful way (I included the pagan philosophers cause why not, it helps having them in mind since they influenced Christianity so much):
Gregory Palamas
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Saint John of the Cross
Teresa of Avila
Thomas Aquinas
Augustine of Hippo
John Crysostom
Origen
Clement of Alexandria
Basil the Great
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Athanasius of Alexandria
Seraphim of Sarov
Evagrius Ponticus
Macarius of Egypt
Joseph Ratzinger
John Duns Scotus
Saint Bonaventure
Gregory the Great
Philo of Alexandria
Justin Martyr
Ignatius of Antioch
Theophilus of Antioch
Gregory of Nyssa
Basil of Caesarea
Nicholas of Cusa
John Scotus Eriugena
Meister Eckhart
Athanasius of Alexandria
Cyril of Alexandria
Catherine of Siena
John Scotus Eriugena
Maximus the Confessor
Edith Stein
Hildegard von Bingen
Plato
Aristotle
Heraclitus
Plotinus
John Paul II

>>20234596
I would also add von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Thomas Merton, etc. and I included two recent popes because all the theological developments of Vatican II have seemed to me to at very least open modern Christianity’s eyes to its radical tradition and generally being more open-minded about its views

>>20234596
I compiled this little list in the first place as more to remind myself to look into them so yea again I don’t know a ton at all about certain ones listed

>>20234596
>I have not even come close to deeply reading these thinkers but put down all their names
typical /lit/ poster

>>20234704
Lmaoo it’s just that I’ve read much more about certain ones over others, but I don’t think you gotta read a whole anthology to sense the trend you feel

Read Versluis' Platonic Mysticism and read his summary of Basilides' gnosticism and its similarities to Buddhist nondualism at the beginning of The Mystic State, you will find a lot to agree with

His thesis is that nondualist Platonist mysticism has been an integral part of the Western philosophical tradition since at least Plato, with both the Gnostics and the Neoplatonists being high representatives, but it sometimes gets suppressed under literalist Christianity.

Sure, some of the thousands of Christian thinkers might've had thoughts that resembled Vedanta. So what? You're not going to unlock the ultimate truth of Christianity or something. Similar does not mean the same.

>>20234896
I mean as more of a general characterization, I’m familiar with some classifications of Hindu/Buddhist philosophies and I think they’re useful to broadly categorize the trends found in other religions since those religions don’t tend to do that meta-analysis about themselves. But just from a purely orthodox system I think it’s interesting to work towards proving that the “real” (orthodox) position is far different than how most people conceive of it, which can help in changing the way it’s viewed in general

>>20234913
A lot of people who analyze Christianity and decide that Hinduism is better characterize Christianity as being dualistic and can dismiss Christianity, but I think it’s more productive to understand a tradition on its own terms and demonstrate how it in essence isn’t what people say it is but rather something more profound

>>20234913
>But just from a purely orthodox system I think it’s interesting to work towards proving that the “real” (orthodox) position is far different than how most people conceive of it, which can help in changing the way it’s viewed in general
What are actionable ways you are going to do this in your life?

>>20234877
Hmm I see, definitely interesting and outright dismissal of Gnosticism in understanding Christianity is totally unreasonable to me, but I’m interested maybe more specifically in understanding orthodox (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) positions as they stand on their own since Christians and their tradition tend not to be convinced or consider anything related to Gnosticism. Pretty much I’d completely agree with you I just like the idea of pulling the rug out from underneath the Christian tradition, so to speak, by showing how by adhering to their strict orthodoxy alone actually flips the understanding to something completely different and revolutionary, which is what I hope will continue happening into the future after Vatican II especially

>>20234936
I am dumb and a hypocrite and whatnot but I’d maybe like to go into academia in the future but also find and proclaim whatever I’ve got to whoever I can I guess. You could definitely pathologize me since I was raised in a Catholic tradition I significantly disagree with, and you could say it’s just me trying to defend my private heresies against some Freudian subconscious whatever forces that I face on a regular basis, trying to overcome cognitive dissonance, etc. but whatever who cares about my bullshit life man I’d like to see wide-scale pressure on Catholics worldwide to change their views, which the Church of today is pressuring Catholics to do (they’re slowly but surely having to reconcile their brought-up faith with the “antipope” tendencies of Francis and recent popes after Vatican II)

>>20234584

The Romanian Traditionalist Michel Valsan (who himself became a Sufi Muslim) argued that metaphysical core of Christianity was in agreement with Advaita Vedanta in this series of letters to Philippe Guiberteau, a Catholic translator of Dante.

https://www.gornahoor.net/library/Doctrine_Multiple_States_Being_Christianity.pdf

>“Let us immediately address the quodammodo. Saint Bernard does not say absolutely that things are not, but ‘in a certain way’. Monism is excluded. Conversely, he does not limit himself to saying that God is the Being (Esse, and not Ens) of Himself and of everything, which would be who ipsius est, and omnium esse, he specifies: Being itself (his “Being”), which suum ipsius est, and omnium esse. Let us insist again. Saint Bernard does not say that God is the Being of Himself (genitive) and of everything, which would be qui sui ipsius est, et omnium esse but that He is the very Being (nominative) of Himself and of all. In other words, Suum qualifies Esse as both the Esse of God (Ipsius) and of everything (Omnium). There is nothing, to our knowledge, in the whole of the certainly Orthodox Catholic tradition, which comes so close, even in expression, to the Vedantic doctrine of the Supreme Self (Paramatma).

I am becoming inclined to understand it's like AKC quoting Eckhart: "fusion without confusion" – "distinction without difference (beddhabeddha)".

However it may be, what is the most important is living a penitent life to purify ourselves from what 'is not' ("we are not" as St. Catherine of Siena puts). It is like what St. Augustine says something (approximately) like this: "God undresses us of what it is not and dresses us with what is" [my transl.], which has been my petition recently.

>>20234584
Yes pretty much. "Christianity" if we even admit that such a thing has existence, does instead not only constitute a general set of highly individualisable traditions etc. Can be accommodated to whatever metaphysics in the general sense, of course not exactly vedantic no two traditions can be comparatively exact, however, from my study of Christianity particularly Orthodoxy with this seemingly unnecessary stress of the "Father" being this ground, which is more or less "morelike" the "Essence" I think it'd be reasonable to suggest that the Trinity is really just Father (Brahman) Jesus (Ishvara ≈ Siva) and the Holy Spirit (Shakti) with slight variations between, Mary is supposed to be a form of Shakti of some sort, the saints all are all I guess like Dharmapala or Psychopomps which are really just anthropomorphisations of Bardos of some kind, the theology is panentheistic, and the Essences and Energies are not Absolutely distinct, but virtually so, there is also no such thing as Polytheism, it's creatio ex deo not nihilo.
Don't care what people say against my observations here, I would never try to popularise such comparisons either, and I'm not trying to syncretise anything, and the retards who say shit like bbbut there is an Absolute distinction between Abrahamism and Non-Abrahamism on the Metaphysical level are sentimental retards, I've talked to some people who hold this, but then say well Sufism is valid! Did they forget that this is an abrahamic tradition? Sick of the Hindu "Dharmic" larper vs. Christian shit, low iq rubbish, I literally see telegram groups for example run by so-called Hare Krishnas who just post 1000s of posts talking about how much they hate christcucks and wish it's extinction — that sort of mentality is definitely demonic possession, they are only larping as religious.

>Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!

>“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew xi, 30)

Yet these people have not advanced past the very first stage of the spiritual life, stuck in the appearances of things, I am positive that these people are possessed.

>>20234998
>I literally see telegram groups for example run by so-called Hare Krishnas who just post 1000s of posts talking about how much they hate christcucks and wish it's extinction
Why would Hare Krishnas hate Christians? Aren't they basically hippies?

>>20234960
To be honest it sounds like you're just trying to make the religion you were born into more relevant/meaningful than it is. I did that too for a long time and I recommend you just make peace with it and move on with your life.

You can have all these problems with the Catholic church and speak against it without creating some new pseud-Vedantic Christianity in the process.

>>20234961
>>20234974
Very very interesting, I’ll put more reading into the quotes mentioned here, and also very interesting that the Vatican under John Paul II pretty much confirmed Meister Eckhart can be a considered “a good and orthodox theologian”

>>20235012
I don't know what these people are, I think more less the "blood and soil" retard types, but they are quick also to endorse "Aryan" traditions, are you really telling me you haven't seen those sort of things online? there are tons of pagan larpers like that, who pretend they are so metaphysical etc. And muh "dharmic" I'll give you an example of a group:

Death to Abhrahmic Religions .
Embrace paganism and Sanatan Dharma .

Surf through Kaliyuga !!!
https://t.me/Expose_christianity

Lol from their description:

>Death to Abhrahmic Religions .
Embrace paganism and Sanatan Dharma .

Essentialy metaphysically inept /pol/tards, entertaining but these people have issues.

>>20235037
Theologizing is a waste of time.

>>20235038
Regarding Eckhart I like this passage from Christopher Dawson:

>n Eckhart the Dionysian current, reinforced by further neo-Platonic elements derived from Proclus and the Arabs, reaches its extreme development and seems to pass the utmost bounds of orthodoxy and to bring the medieval theological development to a conclusion not far removed from the pure monism of the Vedanta. Nevertheless, as Denifle pointed out long ago, Eckhart is not an oriental pantheist nor a modern idealist; he is a medieval Dominican and a scholastic, and in order to understand his views it is necessary to put them in their historical context and relate them to the intellectual milieu in which they originated. Thus when Eckhart asserts that God is all, that creatures are sheer nothing and that it is a fallacy to speak of God as good, he is merely expressing in paradoxical and unguarded language the commonplaces of the Dionysian theology which are to be found in a more balanced but no less complete form in the standard works of Ulrich of Strasburg and of St. Thomas Aquinas himself. But whatever may be thought of Eckhart, there can be no question as to the fundamental and entire orthodoxy of his disciples, John Tauler, Henry Suso, Henry of Nordlingen, and John Ruysbroeck, through whom the mystical metaphysics of Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart became one of the great sources of spiritual life and inspiration for the later medieval Church. The Friends of God, as they were called, gained adherents among every class throughout the Rhineland and Lower Germany. They included not only learned Dominican theologians, like Tauler, and nuns like the members of the Dominican communities at Toss and Unterlinden, but also secular priests, like Henry of Nordlingen, knights of the Teutonic Order such as Nicholas von Laufen, the Strasburg banker Rulman Merswin, and even peasants and uneducated lay people. Thus the via negativa of the medieval mystic, which seems to the outsider to lead to a pantheistic nihilism that leaves no room for any social or moral activity, actually inspired one of the great popular religious movements of the Middle Ages.

>>20235037
Makes sense yea, I am against trying to do that to Christianity and often times I get very discouraged by the walls that parts of the Christian tradition seem to throw up against me but that’s why I’m trying to stress only the thoughts of individuals who are considered orthodox. I do think there is much more to the tradition but it’s crazy how little Christians tend to know about their own history, not like I’m some expert but peering over the edge I can see a lot more I think

>>20235037
>To be honest it sounds like you're just trying to make the religion you were born into more relevant/meaningful than it is.
A religion is always as relevant and as meaningful as (you) can make it, this is a midwit take, but yeah I agree, he should just keep these personal metaphysical opinions to himself, I have many insights myself, but I have not ever thought of invalidating Christianity or any other religion for that matter via some Apologetic, I couldn't care less my path is an "individual" one not, to be some Modern Neo-Paul.

>>20234584
There is no absorption into God or the Absolute in Christianity. There is nothing like moksha in Christianity. Salvation is not the same thing as moksha.
You are a disingenuous faggot.

>>20235051
Lovely, thanks for sharing, gives me a lot more to look into

>>20235053
>individuals who are considered orthodox
I hope you realize that these people don't have profound, special truths. You quote them as if they have such authority, but it's all baseless.

>>20235061
Yes there is. Jesus is an example.

>>20235058
>A religion is always as relevant and as meaningful as (you) can make it
Anything can be meaningful in such a way. Baseball has meaning to it because people make it so. I just want to point out these this Christian metaphysical stuff is a waste of time. I think this litigious attitude only corrodes the mind over time.

>>20235061
Yes, but that’s exactly my point I’d say, I think “reabsorption” taken by itself is naive and traditions like Tantra sought to move beyond that. The more bhedabheda approach, the tantric one, and I argue, the Christian one, is to see how God Himself is involved in a process of movement and we are called to tie ourselves to that movement, Love, etc. calling to mind Aquinas’s Pure Act and there’s stuff Catherine of Siena said about becoming put to flame with God, becoming emptied of oneself to become a pure flame of God, or John of the Cross talking about how one can become divinized, become God, etc. and being transformed but at the same time remaining just as distinct from God as he was before the transformation

>>20235061
>yes you are correct Christianity is not annihilationistic if that is what you mean???
Or that the persons of the Trinity to do not dissolve in Gnosis beyond-being, but this is not true and you have only the slightest understanding based on exoteric dogmas, christian theology that I have looked at, particularly Orthodox, hold that the "Essence" transcends all the Trinity itself, as this itself is cataphatic just read St. Dionysius the Aereopagite.
No need for namecalling, indeed you are the disingenuous faggot.

>Again, ascending yet higher, we maintain that it is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion reason or understanding; nor can it be expressed or conceived, since it is neither number nor order; nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality; nor similarity nor dissimilarity; neither is it standing, nor moving, nor at rest; neither has it power nor is power, nor is light; neither does it live nor is it life; neither is it essence, nor eternity nor time; nor is it subject to intelligible contact; nor is it science nor truth, nor kingship nor wisdom; neither one nor oneness, nor godhead nor goodness; nor is it spirit according to our understanding, nor filiation, nor paternity; nor anything else known to us or to any other beings of the things that are or the things that are not; neither does anything that is know it as it is; nor does it know existing things according to existing knowledge; neither can the reason attain to it, nor name it, nor know it; neither is it darkness nor light, nor the false nor the true; nor can any affirmation or negation be applied to it, for although we may affirm or deny the things below it, we can neither affirm nor deny it, inasmuch as the all-perfect and unique Cause of all things transcends all affirmation, and the simple pre-eminence of Its absolute nature is outside of every negation- free from every limitation and beyond them all.
— St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, Chap V

Notice the very specific wording here in describing the pre-eminent cause.
>Neither filiation not Paternity.

>>20235069
What I’d define as “authority” or “orthodoxy” isn’t taken as meaning that I respect them as being some infallible divinely inspired individuals or whatever, I don’t think anything at all is infallible, but I’ve peaked my interest in these individuals because through some channel or other they’re either explicitly accepted as part of Church orthodoxy as it either currently does or has historically defined itself as

>>20235053
>do that to Christianity
You are confused when was this about actively Doing anything to Christianity this is about solitary metaphysical realisation not larping as an apologist, unless you want to become a theologian or contribute to christian theology or something.

>>20235082
You literally awaken to see oneself as God or the Absolute in Dharmic traditions. Robert Charles Zaehner called this Satanic. Your traditions are not compatible with the Dharma.
In fact, I believe this is an advanced and deceptive means of yours to convert others.
>>20235077
I have never seen a Christian say you can become one with Jesus or that one can become identical to Jesus in terms of sacredness.
>>20235087
Do you *become* OR *awaken* to your *true nature* as the Absolute, that is *God* or *Christ*. Yes or no?

I am the Universe. I am God. To you, saying such things is prideful, but to my sensei, it is the first step on the path.

>>20235102
>I am
>I am
yikes

>>20235105
Look up Sri Ramana Maharshi's self-enquiry method.

>>20235102
>I have never seen a Christian say you can become one with Jesus or that one can become identical to Jesus in terms of sacredness.
This is what theosis is.

>>20235102
>>20235112
You are completely deluded if you identify your self with the Self. An apophaticist wouldn't say "I" or "I am", for him only God is and there is no "I" as in one's self.

Even hindus (like AKC) denounce this identification of one's self with the Self as satanic. For they sustain: there is no identification between self and Self, only the Self is.

Zaehner is completely correct on this.

>>20235087
I should continue, the Christian Trinity is really One and Three, One in the sense that there is One essence, which is the "divine nature" and Three in how we have understood the "Hypostatic relations" by revelation here on earth, every "determination" is not necesserily a limitation as the Hypostatic Relations themselves is simply a Tri-personal personal deity which derives from an impersonal Godhead, but indeed, i would even argue that Christianity is not merely "Tri-personal" but even arguably infinite-personal, but the selective revelation is Tri-personal in the same way you may have the differentiation in some tantric sects like Kashmir Shaivism which further continue on talk about Three Goddesses like Para, Parapara and Apara, in essence these religions are Monopolytheistic,
And Palamas did not Mean Absolute distinction but Virtual.
That simple, and understand i am in no way implying syncretism or something of a counter-traditional nature in that sense, I will not effect such a thing.

>>20235125
Someone else told me this about theosis:

>You are making an (understandable) mistake because of your lack of understanding the doctrine of theosis/divinization. We do not believe that we can become ontologically equal to God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: "The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature": "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God." "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."

You become ontologically equal to the Absolute or God in (most) Dharmic traditions.

>>20234998
>Sick of the Hindu "Dharmic" larper vs. Christian
Be honest, are you not the very anon who attacks "abrahamism" in multiple threads etc? If you are, you are blaming others for what you do.

>>20235102
>*awaken* to your *true nature* as the Absolute, that is *God* or *Christ*. Yes or no?
This is the natural conclusion of the theology, to my understanding, you enter Union with God. What can such a thing mean? You realise your true nature as God, this is implicit, or do you think that there is a Human conditioned divinity, and a God conditioned divinity, so when the Christian tradition asserts that we contain this divinity, what else can it mean?

>>20235091
>they’re either explicitly accepted as part of Church orthodoxy as it either currently does or has historically defined itself as
So they're incidentally orthodox. Big whoop. It sounds like you're trying to use the Church's own orthodox guys against the Church's dogma/beliefs you find to be inauthentic or hypocritical. This it litigious nonsense, bro. I just can't stand seeing someone waste their life on this. Consider the sunk cost fallacy. Cut your loses and move on. I guarantee you will feel better. There is a catharsis in realizing that you wasted so much time for nothing because now you're aware and you can move on.

>>20235131
Your Christian interpretation doesn't work here. The point is that with the dissipation of the individual self (the "I"), one sees their true Self ("Brahman", the "Absolute").

The point is that one can have an absorptive state seeing oneself as ontologically equivalent to God in moksha. This is not the meaning of theosis.

Why are you trying to draw parallels between traditions that don't work?

>>20235144
That is a very unorthodox interpretation. I gave the standard interpretation here: >>20235140

>>20235148
All the perennialists thought christianity was fundamentally the same as hindu and other traditions, yet you disagree. Do you happen to be the one who gets annoyed at Guenonians?

>>20235155
Do you talk to any ordained priests?

>>20235159
I do not talk to priests but I do attend the liturgy on a daily basis etc. Why?

>>20235102
>You literally awaken to see oneself as God or the Absolute in Dharmic traditions. Robert Charles Zaehner called this Satanic.
RC Zaehner worked as a secret agent of the unholy Angloid-Zionist global cabal, which is the very incarnation of Mammon, thereby calling into question anything he says on spiritual matters.

In any case, what Zaehner calls Satanic is affirmed by Jesus himself in John 10:31-39 when Jesus references Psalm 82:6 which says "I said, ‘You are “gods"; you are all sons of the Most High."

>31 Again his Jewish opponents picked up stones to stone him, 32 but Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?”
>33 “We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”
>34 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods”’? 35 If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside— 36 what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? 37 Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. 38 But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” >39 Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2010%3A31-39&version=NIV

>>20235140
I think what's interesting about this is that to some, the Christian theosis/divinization is less profound and limiting when compared to the type of union typically noticed in Dharmic traditions. But I would like to argue that we can challenge ourselves to see in Christianity a nuance that goes beyond the Dharmic position (even though within the tantric currents, developments upon Advaita, etc. the same insight and nuance I'm arguing for with Christianity is gained). With Christianity people tend far too often to excessively emphasize the degree to which man must strive toward God. To me, this is just a reiteration of the ancient Jewish conception of God which is supposed to have been overcome in Christianity. I think that the insight should equally emphasize that God in Christianity is also a reality which extends Itself towards us; calling to mind Aquinas's Actus Purus, Chesterton's conception of the Christian God, etc. What should be emphasized in the Christian tradition is God as Love, which sublates the absolute distinction in God of Unity and Manyness, of something and other, which gets into more of a tantric or Mahayana, Kashmir Shaivist, Vajrayana idea of participation and union, where it's conceived of dynamically. Also all of this gets summed up in Pseudo-Dionysius explicitly talking about the overcoming of One vs. Many in God and also Hegel's dialectical understanding of God

>>20235146
I wouldn't say I'm trying to go against Church dogma, there are surprising things to be found even within the Catechism of the Church. Theologians of Vatican II recognized that the Church needed an overhaul in the sense of looking back to its own roots and taking its theology to its greater logical conclusions. This is a process of development that is currently happening and has been since the 60s; Francis, who many American conservative Catholics dislike, is not some new liberal phenomenon but rather the consequence of a movement that has a history within Church orthodoxy

>>20235151
To be a Sharer or Partaker of something something like a God, is not like becoming s Sharer or Partaker of food, or to possess or to acquire, something which is divinised in its true sense cannot be a mere possession or acquisition of something, as we understand it in the created sense, where someone may give to you a gift, unless you are to imply that there is some sort of emnation or gradation of this divinity, which is instantiated in a particular individual, God is not some energy which can given in "parts" there are no Parts in God.
I think I mean the same thing as you, you do realise your True nature, I say that we all possess this, because nothing can be given by God in this most fundamental sense, it is all there and is all eternal, and ignorance veils it, we can only become partakers or sharers in something we already have.
That's my interpretation, feel free to deconstruct it, as I do think I am veering from the Orthodox interpretation maybe.

>>20235178
Or at veering from your point of view, nothing is given to us or external to us when it comes to God, God is internally given, what do we even mean by external and internal when we speak in relation to God?

>>20235167
It's about movement, becoming, action, intention, divine Eros, self-overcoming, sublation, overcoming of division, inherent in God Himself. This is not the typical Traditionalist reading of Christianity that tries to see it through the lens of Vedanta or Buddhism but a new one that's more Hegelian in nature, like Teilhard de Chardin focusing on God working through evolution, Love as the inner force of all things, Christ as cosmic telos, the whole notion is that the Christian God is precisely this union-in-disunion that systems like Kashmir Shaivism and tantra were getting at. They too emphasized the Word (vac), divine Eros, trinitarian thinking, the tie between the binder and the bound, all in a profound attempt to overcome the limitations of a naive reading of Advaita Vedanta which stops short at identity (think of Schelling's "night in which all sheep are black" vs. Hegel's Absolute of becoming which he himself identified as having an origin in Aquinas's actus purus, which he thought was one of the highest philosophical notions)

>>20235143
Proof? Did you notice a wording pattern or something?

>>20235172
I'm aware of Vatican II, but I think you're missing my larger point about wasting your time on something that won't amount to anything real. Why do you have so much at stake with the Church? This obsessive behavior is not healthy.

>>20235190
Again, it sounds like you're trying to reframe Christianity to be more meaningful/significant than it is.

>>20235195
You're right that I shouldn't cause myself anxiety over it, it's just of big interest to me because I see a lot of potential in it. In the past I really didn't care much about Christianity and had undergone the whole Traditionalist conversion but I've seen how it's broader than that; I'm very much interested in religion and philosophy but don't want to define my views as being negative in relation to Christianity

>>20235190
>It's about movement, becoming, action, intention, divine Eros, self-overcoming, sublation, overcoming of division, inherent in God Himself
No!!!
>It's about immobility, being, non-action, realisation, Eros, again Realisation, sublation yes, indifferentiation, God inherentm.
Anyway "-it's about" is just a point of view, while I see where you are coming from we disagree, this is a matter of point of view, becoming and action etc. "evolution" I think these things are illusory, in their selective meaning.

>>20235200
Missing his point completely, esoterism and metaphysics subsumes exoterism and theological particularism.
Trust Me!

>>20235200
It will always be less profound to those who understand less about it, I'm not trying to read anything "into" Christianity but just saying like guys look at your own tradition and merely pointing out parallels and drawing lines within the tradition for it to make more sense of itself. The same thing happens with Hindus, I have no idea of course since I don't know many Hindus at all but I'd say that the majority of them haven't read the Upanishads or understand them or consider nuances like tantra, so I'd challenge them to do the same with their own tradition, to look into it and see that there's more to it than bhakti dualistic devotion to Krishna as a mere "personality", etc.

>>20235140
>You become ontologically equal to the Absolute or God in (most) Dharmic traditions.
The notion of a literal becoming (transformation) of the non-Absolute into the Absolute is actually an exception in Hinduism and is only found in a few smaller traditions that are ironically dualist like Shaiva Siddhanta, whereby the soul is transformed into a state of being qualitatively the same but numerically different from Shiva. In most Hindu traditions including Advaita Vedanta they teach that the contingent awakens to the presence of the uncreated Absolute within itself as its true 'beingness' or true self, where there is no real transformation of the non-Absolute into the Absolute, but rather a realization of something that has always been actualized from the very beginning, even when people are not aware of it.

>>20234584
Listen Anon I'll say this once and only once. Christianity is much closer to the view of Varajinaveda than anything you've posted. Prabhadavadenja's work in the Vishdajenava is basically just the same thing as Seraphim Benjov's writings. You can extrapolate this outwards obviously not just to all of Orthodoxy but Christianity as a whole, it's in there. The Mhabrajendha is also a good source for this, although it's a bit later so take it as you will.

>>20235239
Kek.

>>20235228
>In most Hindu traditions including Advaita Vedanta they teach that the contingent awakens to the presence of the uncreated Absolute within itself as its true 'beingness' or true self,
Yet it is not clear whether this implies complete identification. I am inclined to believe not even Coomaraswamy believed in complete dissolution of the devotee. The same can be argued for Plotinus (i.e. it would seem pointless if the 'liberated' Socrates would lose all of his qualities or memories as Socrates).

And it seems that even Shankara praticed devotion.

>>20234584
I actually recommend Mnāsajnanāpara's work on Sārmarmdvaita, it's a little dated now but it is perfectly reconcilable with the works of the Russian theologian Thaddius of Moscow.

>>20235239
This

>>20235228
>In most Hindu traditions including Advaita Vedanta they teach that the contingent awakens to the presence of the uncreated Absolute within itself as its true 'beingness' or true self, where there is no real transformation of the non-Absolute into the Absolute, but rather a realization of something that has always been actualized from the very beginning, even when people are not aware of it.
It's the same with Huineng's Platform Sutra in the Ch'an tradition.
I was sleepy and not being precise with language.

>>20235190

One may, and even should, reject Hegel as well as Ruyer’s “gnosis”; the first because it is only an immanentist panlogism, a pseudognosis, the second because it is a gnosis amputated from its supernatural and rightly spiritual dimension. But for all that, it does not seem possible to reject the “need for gnosis” as such, seeing that the root of every intellective aspiration is recognized therein. For it is just this that is at work here. In its excesses, limitations, or even deviations, Hegelianism, like Ruyerism or Spinozism, betrays a demand native to the human intellect that is the sense and expectation of true being, the sense of the absolutely real within us. This is an unassailable fact. Man is essentially and first of all an intellectual
being, a knowing being, even though this knowing may be of the most humble sensory kind; as loudly and keenly as desire might speak within him, it speaks to someone who hears and recognizes it, someone for whom it makes sense or is repudiated. Man is never a desiring machine. But neither is he a believing machine, a “religious automaton” invested with some wholly external revelation or salvation completely incongruous to his nature. He also needs to recognize the Divine Word—it needs to make sense to him and, in return, he needs to recognize himself in it. In other words, and according to Frithjof Schuon’s remarkable formula, we must admit that “the intellect is naturally supernatural or supernaturally natural.” For Revelation (by definition supernatural) to be welcomed into a believer’s intellect, this intellect needs to have “natural” forms of intelligibility at its disposal, forms capable of receiving it and in terms of which it will be interpreted. By understanding revelation, the intellect understands itself as well; it cannot but be “itself as well.” And, if this self-understanding is not an idealist reduction of what is revealed to the a priori conditions for knowledge of the human subject, it is because these intelligible forms are naturally ordered to metaphysical and supernatural realities

...


By renouncing itself, gnosis somehow enters into the obscurity of faith, into that darkness where, as St. John says, the light shines. Only by this renunciation and by this “passion” can its very nature be transformed, become what it is by being converted into and united with its Object. This gnostic ordeal, this “lesson of the Darkness” wherein the spirit, like Moses, ascends the holy mountain of the Sinai, the “mountain of theognosy,” is that very ascent rejected by philosophism from Hegel to Heidegger, namely the absorption of knowledge into its own transcendent contents. And, for want of seeing the need for this intellective transformation, modern philosophy has, at best, sworn itself to the sterility of indefinite analysis, at worst, to the decomposition of its rotting corpse. All too few are, alas, ready to understand this.

>>20235277
Checked. And Based
Good quote from what you sent by Borella:
>This gnostic ordeal, this “lesson of the Darkness” wherein the spirit, like Moses, ascends the holy mountain of the Sinai, the “mountain of theognosy,” is that very ascent rejected by philosophism from Hegel to Heidegger, namely the absorption of knowledge into its own transcendent contents. And, for want of seeing the need for this intellective transformation, modern philosophy has, at best, sworn itself to the sterility of indefinite analysis, at worst, to the decomposition of its rotting corpse. All too few are, alas, ready to understand this.

>>20235250
>I am inclined to believe not even Coomaraswamy believed in complete dissolution of the devotee
In Coomaraswamy's view, the actual being of the devotee is the Brahman-Atman itself and hence unconditioned, unlimited, undecaying and infinite. The changing mind that engages in the act of devotion is not the actual unchanging being/spirit of the devotee, but is more like an accident in the Aristotelian sense, so when the mind ends and the Brahman-Atman remains, there is no dissolution of the being of the devotee., because that being of the devotee and of all devotees and non-devotees alike was already the Brahman-Atman from the beginning and hence immutable
>b-b-but in one letter to someone he mentioned 'fused but not confused', therefore I think he was actually a bhedabhed-
His book "perception of the Vedas" is more or less 449 pages of arguing that only not the Upanishads but also the earlier Vedic layers teach Advaita, and he cites Shankara throughout the book to argue Shankara's teaching are in agreement with the earlier Vedic Samhitas, Brahmanas and Aranyakas, in addition to the later Upanishads, and that they are all teaching the same message throughout the whole Vedic text.

>>20235277
I appreciate the words here and agree with the understanding of Revelation and the ordeal, the conversion with the Object and such, but I think that this is what Hegel was trying to get at, although his method is misunderstood by most people who read him and reacted to him. I think the Traditionalists misunderstood Hegel and attacked a strawman of him, as most historically relevant readers of him did, from Marx to Nietzsche to Evola to Deleuze to Kierkegaard to Schopenhauer, all down the line. I think Slavoj Zizek really does do a good job of interpreting Hegel rightly as being just the opposite of a panlogist, rationalizing system-builder. His whole project, I believe, was a burden he voluntarily took up in order to understand philosophy's natural opening up into radical subjectivity, dynamism, etc. and he can't be understood in the same way people understand Kant. He assimilated rationalism, Kantianism, Spinozism, anyone who came before him, and was really a romantic. He took the time to explore the dialectic immanent to the systems that others before him had built, showing how the dominoes they set up just needed the push to see the movement that they were really trying to point at. To me, Hegel leads into things like magic, spirituality, rather than leading us out of those things.

>>20235222
And to what end?

>>20235301
You do realize his entire thing was to look for the common elements under different dialects right? He was as much advaitin as bhedabhedin. For AKC advaita, bhedabheda, vishishtadvaita and dvaita are all equally orthodox as buddhism and jainism also are.

>>20235224
>It will always be less profound to those who understand less about it,
And to what end is the profundity of something? Surely you must know that this is a far departure from actual observations on the nature of reality.

>The same thing happens with Hindus, I have no idea of course since I don't know many Hindus at all but I'd say that the majority of them haven't read the Upanishads or understand them or consider nuances like tantra, so I'd challenge them to do the same with their own tradition, to look into it and see that there's more to it than bhakti dualistic devotion to Krishna as a mere "personality", etc.
I've been to India many times. Most Hindus are either superstitiously religion in very basic ways, and the ones who think about it at all have the typical "yeah maybe the stories are made up, but I think there might be a god and each religion has some truth to it" (if you get into anything metaphysical/esoteric they won't engage) or they simply don't think about it at all. People just don't care.

>>20235327
>I've been to India many times. Most Hindus are either superstitiously religion in very basic ways, and the ones who think about it at all have the typical "yeah maybe the stories are made up, but I think there might be a god and each religion has some truth to it" (if you get into anything metaphysical/esoteric they won't engage) or they simply don't think about it at all. People just don't care.
Yeah, I'd imagine it to be that way lol from videos I've seen and the few Hindus I've known, shame!

And on the previous thing as far as Christianity goes I think delving more into what people like the Fathers and theologians wrote isn't a departure, just trying to unfold more what's inherent to the tradition itself. Or idk what else you meant by observations

>>20235325
>For AKC advaita, bhedabheda, vishishtadvaita and dvaita are all equally orthodox as buddhism and jainism also are.
This would totally conflict with the actual content of his books, like Perception of the Vedas, wherein every time he uses the word 'Self' there is distinctly Advaitin tone it's used. Even in the one chapter about Bhakti (devotion) in that whole book he spends the whole time talking about Shankara, maya and Advaita readings of the Vedas without so much as mentioning Ramanuja, Bhaskara, Madhva or any other Indian historical thinker once.

I have in fact only seen that viewpoint put forward explicitly by the NeoVedanta movement of Vivekananda. Do you have any passages from Coomaraswamy's published works that you can cite to support your interpretation?

>>20235190
>all in a profound attempt to overcome the limitations of a naive reading of Advaita Vedanta which stops short at identity (think of Schelling's "night in which all sheep are black
It would indeed be incredibly naive to view Advaita as equaling Schelling's metaphysics

>>20235311
To the end of belonging to a Tradition, or receiving multiple initiations, and actually engaging in proper spiritual Praxis, Guénon even as a Muslim never abandoned his post as a universal expositor of tradition. Perennialism is not transcendened and sophia perennis should not be mistaken for religio perennis, I personally don't see any problem with belonging to many seperate and distinct traditions, and having initiations between traditions, thats just my point of view, so long as you are an earnest seeker of wisdom and are not acting as counter-initiation in the sense that you advocate the abolishment of tradition and its replacement with some universalised religio perennis.

>>20235339
Well do you really think you're going to learn anything actually true from these Church Fathers? You could try to figure out what is "authentic" to Christian theology, but why?

>>20235039
Here we have another freak admitting mysticism is basically about racemixing.

>>20235376
>seeker of wisdom
Do you really think you're going to find this in the pages of books? These are the tangled ideas of men. Finding ideas across traditions that are similar or compatible might be fun to do, but ultimately you're just moving around words and tying them together.

>>20235365
Read his letters and judge them by the totality. You don't have to object because in "that one letter he said x". If you want to know the deepest convictions of an author what is better than his personal letters?

For sure he gave a proeminent place to Shankara, but he was not a 'shankara-onlyist'. He also loved St. John and St. Paul, Philo and Plutarch, Plotinus and Eckhart, the Dhammapada etc. So your idea of 'advaita or nothing' is your own.

>>20234584
I suggest you read the gosppel of thomas, an apokryphon

3.Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father's) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father's) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

15.Jesus said, "When you see one who was not born of woman, fall on your faces and worship. That one is your Father."

18.The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"

Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

22.Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) kingdom."

They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom as babies?"

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]."

>>20235376
I mean if we want to even make historical arguments, we'll presently we already know and I am not delegitamising tradition in any way, that all the traditions derive in some way and connect to the primordial tradition, I am not trying to abrogate the fullness of tradition in one or the other independently, from the esoteric perspective that would not be the case, exoterically perhaps, the exoteric domain is more or less a qualified and self-sufficient relativisation, but relativisation none the less, more so affected by temporal inevitabilities, we know that religions fall and rise, and are transformed.
>>20235395
Well as I said, Relativisations, you are saying that books and revealed truths are essentialy "noble lies" and I am saying the ends justify the means which is Transcendence beyond-being, and also, the book or revelation is simply the doorway to experience of a certain kind, to communion, which is constituted by devotion and to metaphysical realisation. Many tunnels lead to the same light, many paths to the same mountain peak, but each path and tunnel may vary in length, in the shape of its course, etc.

>but ultimately you're just moving around words and tying them together.
Yes.
So long as I stay true to the ends of my path, and do not betray this quest for the supernal truth, then i have no problem, most things here in the sense you mean them are relative truths not absolute, which is why I find Protestants who do the Jesus preaching so ignorant etc.

Even false words are true if they lead to enlightenment; even true words are false if they breed attachment.
-Zen Saying
>>20235382
No, you're debasing "mysticism" to the level of race-mixxing, that is spiritual materialism, I can tell you honestly that I am personally not for race-mixxing, the Absolute is unconditioned Raceless, now that does not mean that I am abandoning any notion of Race on earth in the least, but just putting it in the right place, or that I'm denying any immanence and Personality.

>>20235442
>the book or revelation is simply the doorway to experience of a certain kind, to communion, which is constituted by devotion and to metaphysical realisation.
And the latter experience is true Book, the spiritual Book, the Book written on the heart, so to speak.

>>20235407
>For sure he gave a proeminent place to Shankara, but he was not a 'shankara-onlyist'. He also loved St. John and St. Paul, Philo and Plutarch, Plotinus and Eckhart, the Dhammapada etc. So your idea of 'advaita or nothing' is your own.
I'm not saying it's "Advaita or nothing", don't falsely put words in my mouth because that's dishonest of you. You've created an entirely false dichotomy of "Advaita or nothing" versus "all are equally orthodox".

I'm pointing out that Schuon and Guenon both explicitly say that Advaita goes farther than the other schools and is generally the most complete explanation of the full truth, which amounts to saying that when Advaita and another school disagree, Advaita has the correct answer; and all the indications are that Coomaraswamy held this exact same view. This doesn't make other schools "nothing", it just means that they are conveying in their own way truths which are most fully expressed in Advaita.

Schuon can be seem summarizing this exact attitude when he writes "we take our stand on Shankaracharya, not on an Ibn ʿArabī; the latter we accept only insofar as we find in him something of the Vedanta". You can see Coomaraswamy doing it when he rejects the normative Buddhist understanding of Buddhism entirely and writes about how Buddha actually taught an Upanishadic non-dual Atman. That's not really "regarding Advaita and Buddhism as both being equally Orthodox", because it's actually projecting a crypto-Advaita reading onto Buddhism that is rejected by like 95+% of all Buddhist schools historically. It's actually saying "Advaita and Buddhism are both equally Orthodox if you pretend Buddha was a proto-Advaitin" which is hardly ranking them equally. Searching "Coomaraswamy Madhva" doesn't even return any relevant results on google, I'm pretty sure Coomaraswamy never wrote anything more than a few sentences in passing on Dvaita, if at all.

>>20235442
>Protestants who do the Jesus preaching so ignorant etc.
Not so much because they're lying that's understandable, but because they do not possess a means to the ends, of course maybe there are some true exceptions, but their egalitarianism invalidates whatever initiation they think they're sharing.

>>20235454
Well maybe if we view those Protestants as simply "corrective" mechanisms, they play the role as the necessary evil who misleads, some people have to be mislead to awaken to the fact that they're being mislead, but I'm sure those sorts of people in their pride and arrogance do not truly think of themselves as the fall-guys for correction, they would probably be very insulted by that.

>>20235458
Maybe I am the fall-guy for correction in my pride and arrogance.....
Silence is the best conclusion

>>20235442
No matter how creative and well-versed your conceptual thinking its, conceptual thinking surely will not bring you to Transcendence beyond-being. Your eclectic metaphysics is a house of cards and you are accomplishing nothing but obsessing over it.

"What are you so hotly chasing? Putting a head on top of your head, you blind fools? Your head is right where it should be. What are you lacking? ... There is no Buddha, no Dharma, no training and no realization." - Linji of the Cha'an (Zen) tradition

>>20235453
I believe it was Rama who wrote the note saying he believed in the orthodoxy of – even – jainism. If that was the case, do you think he would have a problem with dvaita?

When AKC says christianity contains the full truth do you think he believed that insofar as christianity is crypto-advaitin?

>>20235467
>"What are you so hotly chasing? Putting a head on top of your head, you blind fools? Your head is right where it should be. What are you lacking? ... There is no Buddha, no Dharma, no training and no realization." - Linji of the Cha'an (Zen) tradition

Of course I agree there is no God, no metaphysical realisation, etc. Etc. Etc. From the apophatic via negativa point of view, the double negation is an affirmation, a metaphysical postive, to even call the delimitation of infinity a delimitation is a limitiation, these sorts of "contemplations" are the most direct.

>>20235491
E.g.

While relative freedom belongs to every being under any condition, absolute freedom can belong only to the being freed from the conditions of manifested existence, whether individual or even supra-individual, and has become absolutely “one”, to the degree of the pure Being, or “without duality” if its realization surpasses Being. It is then, but only then, that one can speak of the being “who is in himself his own law”, because that being is fully identical with his sufficient reason,which is both his principial originand final destiny. ~Rene Guenon,Multiple States of the Being

>Freedom is the absence of constraint, a definition negative in form but fundamentally positive, for it is constraint that is a limitation, that is to say a veritable negation.

There is the:
>Freedom of Indifference
>Freedom of Difference

>There is the possibility of freedom from non-being
>There is the actuality of freedom from being

Since Nonbeing (the metaphysical 0) can neither be determined nor determine itself, the absence of constraint can only result in “non-action” This is the “freedom of indifference”, i.e., the sense of detachment, paradoxically, acting without acting. There is no “doer” to do something.

>Because there is no duality, there are necessarily no constraints. This proves that freedom is a possibility insofar as it results immediately from ‘nonduality’, which is obviously exempt from every contradiction.

Being is the metaphysical One, i.e., metaphysical Unity, the first determination from the Zero of Nonbeing. As One, it is obviously not subject to constraint by anything else. The absence of constraint is what is meant by “freedom”. Hence, freedom exists in the domain of Being or manifestation. To say it another way:

>unity presents itself in a way as a specification of the principial ‘nonduality’ of Nonbeing.

Universal Being cannot be determined, but determines itself. Hence, in manifestation, freedom necessarily operates in differentiated activity, unlike the non-action of nonduality. In the human state, particularly, this is “action” in the conventional use of the word. The human being is conscious and creative, manifesting his possibilities. He is One, a Whole, insofar as he has a stable Self which is his principal of unity.

>It takes self-knowledge and efforts of self-purification to be free.

>>20235491
>>20235512
I need to stop coping

>>20235491
>the double negation is an affirmation
C'mon dude you're just taking all this to affirm the perpetuation of your own obsessive, pointless activity.

>Universal Being cannot be determined, but determines itself. Hence, in manifestation, freedom necessarily operates in differentiated activity, unlike the non-action of nonduality. In the human state, particularly, this is “action” in the conventional use of the word. The human being is conscious and creative, manifesting his possibilities. He is One, a Whole, insofar as he has a stable Self which is his principal of unity.

This is just a tangle of wordplay. Wake the fuck up.

>>20235520
Is this self-awareness? Are you now taking a step back?

>>20235522
Nice double Dubs, it not Obsession

>There are nevertheless two sorts of concentration to be distinguished, which are essentially different. The one is disinterested concentration and the other is interested concentration. The first is due to the will free of enslaving passions, obsessions and attachments, whereas the other is the result of a dominating passion, obsession, or attachment. A monk absorbed in prayer and an enraged bull are, the one and the other, concentrated. But the one is in the peace of contemplation whilst the other is carried away by rage. Strong passions therefore realise themselves as a high degree of concentration. Thus, gluttons, misers, arrogant people and maniacs occasionally achieve a remarkable concentration. But, truth to tell, it is not a matter of concentration but rather obsession in connection with such people.
>True concentration is a free act in light and in peace. It presupposes a disinterested and detached will. For it is the condition of the will which is the determining and decisive factor in concentration. This is why yoga, for example, demands the practice of yama and niyama (yama—the five rules of moral conduct; niyama—the five rules of mortification) before the preparation of the body (through respiration and posture) for concentration and the practice of the three degrees of concentration itself (dharana, dyana, samadhi—concentration, meditation and contemplation).
>>20235522
>Wordplay
It's not wordplay it's agree with it, 'absolute freedom can only belong to being freed from the conditions of manifested existence.'

>>20235522
>Wake the fuck up.
To what you foul-mouthed bastard!!!!!

>>20235535
*not wordplay I agree with it*
Regardless, this is all at best an exercise of a 'disiniterested and detached will,' the detachment increases and scales to the length of the discussion.

>>20235543
Just pull your head out of this metaphysical net. Your delusions have swarmed you. You think you'll go to academia with this? You think you'll have any impact on people's beliefs?

“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

>>20235522
Nah you're a demon trying to test me!!! I unwill climb the ladder of realisation, I unwill try to reach the supra-human order, I don't care about your soul-denying practical apophaticism, it is dishonest!!!!
>>20235547
Influence on other people's beliefs, no such thing, most of the time I am discussing with myself, these are just personal excericises usually in dialectic, do you think you will influence my "belief?" I come here for learning that's it not posturing, you however have only insulted me and said:
>coping mechanism
After seeing you give a Chaan Buddhist quote I thought you might seriously be here in good faith but it seems you're taking a rather nihilistic position, do you practice mandalas, mantras,mudras,abhiṣekas, anddeity yoga?
Zen seems like a soulless larp, you are counter-tradition if your objective is to invalidate "Metaphysics" on the basis of your apriori apophaticism, are you a naturalist etc. Aswell? I thought I was speaking to a someone esoteric....

>>20235568
I'm not saying Zen is in entirety a soulless larp, in fact I have no clue about that Tradition, but seeing that it's been popularised in the West, I'm guessing these aberrations of Zen are indeed untraditional, probably appeal to atheist boomers and spiritual reject nietzcheans. Are you actually a "Zen Buddhist" or was that a larp misappropriating a quote to serve your Atheistic agenda?

>>20235547
>“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Nooooooo!!!!

>>20235568
Dude wtf. I'm not a demon. Demons only exist in mythology.
>most of the time I am discussing with myself
You sound like you seriously need help. I never even said "coping mechanism", go ahead and ctrl+f, I never said it. I've been immersed in all of this kind of stuff before and there's nothing good to get out of it. You just drown yourself in all these fanciful concepts.

>>20235568
>I unwill try to reach the supra-human order
What are you even talking about? A part of you must be aware that there is no corresponding reality to these things.

>>20235582
>I've been immersed in all of this kind of stuff before and there's nothing good to get out of it. You just drown yourself in all these fanciful concepts.
DOUBT
Give some context to your background in this sort of stuff, your experiences, etc. Then try to recount how you exactly became "disillusioned?" Tons of shills have said this stuff to me when it comes to Traditionalism, but it turns out they never got interested in it in the first place, or they were just overwhelmed or became arbitrarily disinterested, what is so flawed about studying esoteric traditions which have been passed on in lineages for thousands of years, this is the closest link we have to prehistory, the primordial even from a purely anthropological perspective, why does it have zero value to you? You Must be a nihilist hylic! There's no way you don't believe in hyperborea like mee!!!
>coping mechanism
You never said it, but I implied as much, and you affirmed me in saying "I need to stop coping" you called that "self-awareness" so perhaps, you did indirectly say this.

>>20235595
>You Must be a nihilist hylic! There's no way you don't believe in hyperborea like mee!!!
This sounds like satire. Are you just messing with me?

Seriously take a step back from all of this. All of this. Ask what you're doing - not climbing the ladder or whatever - ask what you're REALLY doing with your life by reading all of this stuff

>You never said it, but I implied as much, and you affirmed me in saying "I need to stop coping" you called that "self-awareness" so perhaps, you did indirectly say this.
Dude. I didn't even say "I need to stop coping". I thought you were having a moment of self-awareness and was hopeful that you were pulling your head out of this mess.

>>20235591
"Corresponding reality"
This is not some Empirical larp, what do you mean by a "correspondence" here, are you confident that there is nothing beyond human comprehension, of a supra-human(supra-individual, the Universal, the Unmanifested, Formless) order in the sense that it is beyond formal manifestation that is forms, how about sleep I mean that is at least a subtle and extra-corporeal indicator of formlessness,

Look at all the living creatures around you, science can hardly explain what animates them, and what animates us those sorts of explanations are totally inadequate — I hope you are already at least aware of that much, you are just limiting yourself.

>"The "gross state" in fact is nothing else than the corporeal existence itself, to which [...] human individuality belongs by one of its modalities only, and not in its integral development. As to the "subtle state", it includes, in the first place, the extra-corporeal modalities of the human being, or of every other being situated in the same state of existence, and also, in the second place, all other individual states [...] It may be said, therefore, that the human being, considered in its integrality, comprises a certain sum of possibilities which constitute its corporeal or gross modality, and in addition, a multitude of other possibilities, which, extending in different directions beyond the corporeal modality, constitute its subtle modalities; but all these possibilities together represent, nonetheless, one and the same degree of universal Existence. Itfollows fromthis that human individuality is at once much more and much less than Westerners generally suppose it to be: much more, because they recognize in it scarcely anything except the corporeal modality, which includes but the smallest fraction of its possibilities; much less, however, because this individuality, far from really constituting the whole being, is but one state of that being among an indefinite multitude of other states. Moreover the sum of all these states is still nothing at all in relation to the personality, which alone is the true being, because it alone represents its permanent and unconditioned state, and because there is nothing else which can be considered as absolutely real."

Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, chapter 2: «Fundamental distinction between the 'Self' and the 'ego'», p. 28.
>>20235618
>I didn't even say
NOT MY POINT CLEARLY

>>20235641
By beyond I don't mean not in, just beyond in a pretty minimum sense.

>>20235641
I don't see myself as being of any real help to you at this point, so count me as probably yet another person in your life who you've distanced by your delusions. I do hope the best for you and that, someday, you wake up.

>>20235618
>Seriously take a step back from all of this. All of this. Ask what you're doing - not climbing the ladder or whatever - ask what you're REALLY doing with your life by reading all of this stuff
Intellection and Catharsis, what differentiates man from the beast?
Hyperborea etc. Is not an end in itself that would be sentimental, what I pursue is perfection in spirit and cultivated virtue, to make the mind indomitable, impervious, what I seek is Knowledges of this variety, what I see is beyond the limitations of corporeal existence ultimately, all life is a preparation for death, what I seek is ascension, realisation, repentance and inner-peace, expanding and all-consuming silences, acceptance of eternity of immortality, what I seek is nothing harmful to anyone in fact, it is refuge in the deep in the solitary eternals, supernals, what I seek IS God, what I Shun is the current world of relativity, of variety of difference, the light.

And there is nothing you can do about it!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>20235667
What I seek is infinity, and I will rest in it, I do not believe in anything other than free-will also, and not in democratic sense either, in some moralistic egalitarian communism, just as there are differences in external beauty so to is there not a hierarchy per say but, states of being, passages between them and between worlds, the eyes of God are discriminatory.

>>20235674
The only Goal of Man on Earth is Divinisation, All tend toward the Good, toward the True, just as the rivers follow their course set out in the earth before the earth after the earth, the waters of earth have only one primordial source, the movements of the waters are but oscillations of one primordial movement, the human wherever he be is but an oscillation of the perfect, the good.
the ocean we All seek!

>>20235667
>>20235674
>>20235688
Whatever you say, friend. I wish you well.

>>20234584
yes, all the religions were originally talking about the same thing.
direct religious experience > all the theological writings in the world

>>20235904
Amen

>>20235487
Yes to both questions, AKC would never have phrased the latter question like that, but in practice that's what he usually means

>>20234961
>The Romanian Traditionalist Michel Valsan

Complete hack. He didn't know anything about Sufism, Islam, or Christianity.

>>20236409
>Complete hack. He didn't know anything about Sufism, Islam, or Christianity
Care to elaborate?

>>20236380
This idea that all truth is somehow advaita resembles the protestant mentality in which 'truth' was finally revealed around 1500s with the reformers. In that case truth was revealed (in the truest sense of the word) in the 800s with Shankara while it was elsewhere obscured, concealed.

This is 100% protestant mentality.

>>20236443
>This idea that all truth is somehow advaita resembles the protestant mentality in which 'truth' was finally revealed around 1500s with the reformers. In that case truth was revealed (in the truest sense of the word) in the 800s with Shankara while it was elsewhere obscured, concealed.
This isn't an accurate analogy for the situation, since in the view of both Guenonians and in the view of normal Hindu Advaitins plenty of people had already realized the truth of Advaita centuries before Shankara, including the Vedic sages who composed the Upanishads and later people who composed texts like the Bhagavad-Gita etc, as well as early Vedantins like Gaudapada and other people whose works Shankara cites but whose works don't survive to the present day (like Dramidacarya etc). Guenon also speculates in his writings that there was a hidden intellectual elite in the West in the medieval era who read into Christian metaphysics at a deeper level to reach an Advaita-like understanding.

>Shankara was not in any sense the founder, discoverer, or promulgator of a new religion or philosophy; his great work as an expositor consisted in a demonstration of the unity and consistency of Vedic doctrine and in an explanation of its apparent contradictions by a correlation of different formulations with the points of view implied in them. In particular, and exactly as in European Scholasticism, he distinguished between the two complementary approaches to God, which are those of the affirmative and negative theology. In the way of affirmation, or relative knowledge, qualities are predicated in the
Supreme Identity by way of excellence, while in the way of negation all qualities are abstracted. The famous “No, no” of the Upanisads, which forms the basis of Shankara’s method, as it did of the Buddha’s, depends upon a recognition of the truth—expressed by Dante among many others—that there are things which are beyond the reach of discursive thought and which cannot be understood except by denying things of them.
- AK Coomaraswamy, Vedanta and the Western Tradition
http://worldwisdom.com/uploads/pdfs/149.pdf

>>20234960
>but I’d maybe like to go into academia in the future
bro you sound schizophrenic, nobody will want to engage with this stuff

>>20235667
WTF

>>20234854
>Lmaoo
filtered

>>20239765
What?

>>20235140
>“When we have attained some degree of holiness we should always repeat to ourselves the words of the Apostle: “Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me’ (1 Cor. 15:10), as well as what was said by the Lord: ‘Without Me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5). We should also bear in mind what the prophet said: ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it’ (Ps. 127:1), and finally: ‘It does not depend on-man’s will or effort, but on God’s mercy’ (Rom. 9:16). Even if someone is sedulous, serious and resolute, he cannot, so long as he is bound to flesh and blood, approach perfection except through the mercy and grace of Christ. James himself says that ‘every good gift is from above’ Jas. 1:17), while the Apostle Paul asks: ‘What do you have which you did not receive? Now if you received it, why do you boast, as if you had not received it?’ (1 Cor. 4:7). What right, then, has man to be proud as though he could achieve perfection through his own efforts?”
+ St. John Cassian,The Philokalia: The Complete Text (Vol. 1), “On the Eight Vices: On Pride”

>“The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who fills the whole universe, passes through all believing, meek, humble, good, and simple human souls, dwelling in them, vivifying and strengthening them. He becomes one spirit with them and everything to them – light, strength, peace, joy, success in their undertakings, especially in a pious life, and everything good – “going through all understanding, pure and most subtle spirits” (Wisdom of Solomon vii, 23). “We have been all made to drink into one Spirit” (I Cor. xii.13). All pious people are filled with the Spirit of God similarly as a sponge is filled with water.”
+ St. John of Kronstadt,My Life in Christ

>Nothing is more opposed to God than pride, for self-deification is concealed in it, its own nothingness or sin. Thus more than anything humility is acceptable to God, which considers itself nothing, and attributes all goodness, honor, and glory to God alone. Pride does not accept grace, because it is full of itself, while humility easily accepts grace, because it is free from itself, and from all that is created. God creates out of nothing. As long as we think that we can offer something of ourselves, He does not begin His work in us. Humility is the salt of virtue. As salt gives flavor to food, so humility gives perfection to virtue. Without salt, food goes bad easily, and without humility, virtue is easily spoiled by pride, vainglory, impatience - and it perishes. There is a humility which a man gains by his own struggles: knowing his own insufficiency, accusing himself for his failings, not allowing himself to judge others. And there is a humility into which God leads a man through the things that happen to him: allowing him to experience afflictions, humiliations, and deprivations.
+(St. Philaret of Moscow, The Glory of the Mother of God, 9)

>>20241027
So after doing some reading the talk of "ontological distinction" is just foreign to orthodoxy this is simply a matter of "pride" something which one must be emptied of before the possibility of true deification is even attainable....... to "recieve Union," essentialy while affirming ones identity with God, in the way the "philosophers" assert is simply a preparation, it's totally introductory and prefatory, that may be the End but its not the Way, in my opinion this matter of "ontological distinction" is purely philosophical speculation it's an image in the mind so to speak. One must firstly undergo purification before illumination, to undergo purification is to kenotically remove all images and idols from the mind, that's just the way of ascesis, /lit/ pseuds need to realise that, whether the matter of ontological distinction is right or wrong is besides the point, begin on the path, because talking about it and philosophising in this manner, from the Christian point of view is secondary even to the "theology" which is simply one "popular" intellectual approach.

>>20241027
Notice from the second quote, God fills the Universe, and we know the Holy Spirit is essentialy Shakti-like if you want to be comparative, God fills the human like a sponge is filled with water, this is not the simple manualist thomist two-tier Created vs. Divine or Natural vs. Supernatural understanding.

A good pdf and pic. Related,
https://slidelegend.com/orthodoxy-and-religion_5a1d7e761723dd31a87537cc.html

"Orthodoxy" is not a religion and it is not Christianity

>According toPseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the fundamental phases of "Christian mysticism" were the purgative, illuminative, and the unitive ways, a schema which, in that form, can be also be found in the initiatic path.
That's all it is and is only a part of it,

>>20241087
Meant to attach this pic.

>>20241090
Simple as that, there is no "theological" explication required, or any necessary "metaphysical explication" whether by union the individual is a Ramanuja or a Shankara, is just that an individual disposition, after all people have many points of view, just as conciousness which may be thought of as a clear light is known through various coloured filters, this is where people go wrong, there is no false point of view, dvaita and advaita they both can exist together in the body, just as arrogance and humility can, this is the proper "non-dual" point of view which encompasses the dual, and is both simultaneously dual and non-dual, well whatever.
A Traditionalist does not convert to a religion he is by nature once he effectively realises the fundamental and essentialy unity of traditions unconvertible, religion is entirely illusory in this exterior sense, Tradition is eternal wisdom.

>>20234584
>something similar the Christianity
>Christianity came from that
Haha cool now I can continue to be a degenerate!

>>20234584

Orthodox Christian here.

I would be interested in actually hearing your understanding of Vishishtadvaita, because every single vedic I've talked to that subscribed to it couldn't explain it to me in a way that didn't ultimately reduce to advaita.

At the level of the difference between God and the creation, there is an ontological division. This simply cannot be worked around with any philosophical reading, unless you go into heretical interpretations like Origenism, since he had elements of platonic syncretism. This is because it is dogmatic that time has a beginning, and was created out of nothing, and all of the created order is bound by time. God Himself is not bound by these limitations.

This does not imply a dvaita-style total separation, since creation is sustained by and permeated by God without being part of God.

So, neither vishistadvaita or bhedabheda apply in the distinctions between creation and creator in Orthodox Christianity.

However, when it comes to explications of the Holy Trinity, there is a lot of language that the Saints use that sounds a lot like bhedabeda language. Particularly in a confession of the faith cited one of the councils - I don't particularly remember who it was, but I remember it uses language like "God is divided indivisibly, and indivisibly divided" in regards to the reality of one God in three persons. So in this respect, I can understand why that thought can come about.

However, the explications of Orthodox Christian metaphysics involve clarifying not two distinctions (difference and non-difference), but THREE sets of orthogonal distinctions that do not ontologically collapse into each other, yet are fully unified in the eternal life of God.

St Maximus the Confessor writes the following, and I will post the image of his writings saying this:

There are three ontological realities:

Essence, Person(hypostasis), and Energy.

In created things, these ontological realities are unified within the same subject.

However, in the Holy Trinity, each of these principles is enhypoastatised as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit respectively.

One reason that the Son became incarnate, and acquired a human nature, is to not only overcome the division between the fallen human nature and God (and if bhedabeda were true, there *is* no difference to overcome), but to reveal the ontological mystery of Personhood, and show that one person of the Godhead has two natures, while the Father and Spirit only have one.

All of creation fits into these three categories, and other triads are extant in the created order(Beginning-middle-end, height-width-breadth, inside-outside-border, etc). If strict bhedabheda were true, and the created order as an icon of God reflected difference and non-difference, duality and non-duality coinciding, then this triadic structure is completely inexplicable and unexplainable.

What is necessary here is the Orthodox Trinitarian understanding of God.

>>20241558
You'd like Stratford Caldecott's The Radiance of Being. Very good Christian response to the Guenonian bs.

>>20241596
What does he say about Guenon?

>>20241720
Inhuman Guenonianism is refuted and replaced with a trinitarian understanding of mysticism and metaphysics. Basically, personhood is essential.

>>20241728
>Inhuman Guenonianism is refuted
how?

>>20241728
>Guenon
>refuted
pick one

Guenon is a disappointing thinker. There's a very rich tradition of Hindu theology and metaphysics and he settles on the most basic bitch overrated "I'm a 1900s theosophist" school.

>>20241910
Advaita Vedanta is one of the most logically refined and philosophically rich schools of Eastern philosophy, let alone Hindu or Indian philosophy, and it remains unrefuted to this day.

>>20241951
Saying that doesn't make it true. Kashmir Shaivism mogged the shit out of it and subsumes it completely. Shankara is just a half thought out metaphysics. It's incomplete.

>>20241962
>Kashmir Shaivism mogged the shit out of it and subsumes it completely
Incorrect, Kashmir Shaivism uses totally inconsistent logic and their arguments against Advaita are stupid grug-tier arguments like "hurr durr how can God be alive if he isn't changing"

Chandradhar Sharma refuted Kashmir Shaivism in his book on the Advaita Tradition and he shows how it's an attempt to meld the Absolutism of Advaita with the realism of Sankhya with some added influences of Dharmakirti, but this just leads to inner contradictions (see pic related).

>“Kàshmïra Shaivism admits jivanmukti, emphasises the ultimate reality of the pure Self alone, traces all difference to innate Ignorance, treats bondage and liberation as ultimately unreal, takes everything as the manifestation of the Real, regards immediate spiritual experience as leading to moksa, admits màyà shakti as veiling the Real and as the root-cause of all difference, finitude and limitation and emphasises the need for spiritual discipline to realise the Self. Pratyabhijnâ glides away in aparoksànubhüti of Vedanta. There are many passages in the classical works of this system emphasising the transcendental unity of the Supreme Self and condemning all difference in unmistakable terms. Inspite of all this, this system has a bias against the inactivity of Brahma and the theory of màyà as advocated in Advaita Vedanta and wants to preserve the reality of everything by treating it as the manifestation of the Supreme. We have seen that it is not possible to do so. The School of Kàshmïra Shaivism appears to be a house divided against itself and its inner contradictions can be removed from the standpoint of Advaita Vedanta, which is often implicitly contained in it.”

Lastly Kashmir Shaivism died out and the lineage doesn't survive, while Advaita does.