Books on non-religious theism

[Anonymous No.20104324]

I'm not an atheist but none of the religious books I've read have convinced me of the truth of any specific religion. I spent a lot of time on the Bible and on prayer but could never shake the feeling that it was man-made bullshit. Same for Hinduism when I read the Bhagavad Gita. I admittedly got filtered by the Enneads because I'm just not swayed at all by supposedly rational expositions of the divine, I feel like it lacks something and misses the point. I preferred reading Plato's dialogues though I don't think I'd call myself a Platonist either.
What would you advise me to read at this point? I've seen pic related recommended, is it good?

[Anonymous No.20104371]

>>20104324
Pic is some stemfag obsessing over his panpsychist misreading of Schopenhauer. Non-religious theism is almost a contradiction, as worship is the main factor driving the implementation of theism in systems, and philosophies that put no value on it are usually either radical atheistic or unconcerned with such matters, for example Buddhism.

[Anonymous No.20104382]

>>20104371
I've read a bit about Buddhism but I don't get the whole "Buddhism requires less baseless assumptions than other religions" thing that people usually like to parrot here, it hinges on a lot of easily dismissed superstitions too.

[Anonymous No.20104420]

>>20104324
Have you tried reading Guenon's works on metaphysics and religious symbolism? That's what I would recommend

[Anonymous No.20104427]

>>20104420
I've read some Evola, not Guenon but I'm familiar with perennialism/Traditionalism.

[Anonymous No.20104502]

>>20104382
Faith in Buddha's teachings of doctrines that can not be empirically verified is an essential part of all Buddhist traditions, it's western soys who pretend it's not the case. That being said, theism as understood in the Christian West has no place in Buddhism.

[Anonymous No.20104535]

>>20104427
I would recommend reading Guenon's books on pure metaphysics, his "metaphysics trilogy" is given below and should be read in the order listed.

1) Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta
2) The Symbolism of the Cross
3) Multiple States of the Being

And if you want more I would follow that up with

4) Symbols of Sacred Science (main symbolism work)
5) Metaphysical Principles of Calculus (where he discuss metaphysical symbolism in math)

I think it's fascinating how he lays out a common metaphysics that a lot of traditions share. His treatment of metaphysics is much more mature and in-depth than Evola who rarely discusses pure metaphysics at any length. And you don't have to accept everything he says in order to appreciate the connections he draws and the insights he shares. And he cites so many texts and traditions, that if in the course of reading him you come across something interesting, then that can help you figure out what primary sources you want to read next.

[Anonymous No.20104582]

>>20104535
The shortcoming I found in Guenon is that he tries to translate metaphysics from various traditions into the language of his contemporaries, but then doesn't subject them to anything like the analysis or criticism contemporary western systems were/are subject to. This might be fine if he didn't also insert points arguing that these Eastern systems are superior because they avoid X or Y defect of Western systems, when X and Y are detected due to criticism and rigorous analysis. It comes of as one big appeal to ancient authority. If you find logical contradictions, it must be because you're taking the tradition out of context, or misunderstanding it.

The same sort of thing could be done to claim Scholastic metaphysics was perfect.

There are other books on Advaita that use more recent formalism, look more critically at it, and analyze problems it needs to resolve.

Unfortunately, it's kind of like a review by a fanboy.

[Anonymous No.20104587]

>Be me, like OP
>Try to search for answers
>Reads books
>Drawn to pantheism after reading Eastern philosophy not even knowing what pantheism was at the time
>Maybe maybe... but still nothing
>Read Einstein quote saying he believes in Spinoza's god
>That guy was p smart maybe I should listen to him
>Read Spinoza
>Oh... He just like me... fr!
>Make my own personal idiosyncratic god and "religion" basing myself from spinoza and eastern thought
That was my journey OP, reading Dostoviesky and Viktor Frankl might give you some insight into your beliefs about god and the neccesity of fate from humans.

[Anonymous No.20104599]

Aristotle's Revenge- Edward Feser

[Anonymous No.20104611]

>>20104324
A superintelligent AI would be God for all intents and purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxYbA1pt8LA

[Anonymous No.20104615]

>>20104582
That said, yes, he is better than Evola. You will come away with a decent understanding of the systems he is commenting on, while Evola you get a synchretic blend that uses tradition for authority.

>>20104324
Haven't read this book, but the Idea of the World has an excellent summary of the best criticisms against physicalism, but then presents an idealist ontology that is far from convincing. He sells pancomputationalism short, because it does have a decent answer to the Hard Problem. Definetly worth a read.

As for others:

Kantian Reason - Hegelian Spirit is top tier for religious thought.

Information—Consciousness—Reality - for a book on Pancomputationalism

[Anonymous No.20104620]

>>20104582
>There are other books on Advaita that use more recent formalism, look more critically at it, and analyze problems it needs to resolve.
What books and what problems? Do you have any specific examples? There is already a 1000+ year history of back and forth debates between Advaitins and other Hindu schools, and Advaitins generally hold that they've sufficiently replied to and answered all the charges of the other schools, over the centuries. I'm not aware of any books by westerners that advance some important and novel critique on top of the Indian ones that Advaitins already answered.

[Anonymous No.20104624]

>>20104535
Okay thank you, I'll check out Guenon in more depth then. What makes unable to believe in religion is mostly the symbolism though, or rather the arbitrary systems which perennialists see as tools but that I just see as inventions.
>>20104587
What kind of eastern philosophy did you read? I haven't read Spinoza yet, where did you start with him?
What do you make of pantheism vs. panentheism?

[Anonymous No.20104662]

>>20104620
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296420878_Advaita_A_Contemporary_Critique

Advaita: A Contemporary Critique - by Srinivasa Rao

A Critique of Vedanta’ by L. V. Rajagopa

Many authors who cover this are Indian. Formalism in logic isn't for one culture. That's like saying mathematical formalism (using equations instead of words) is for one culture. Neither is using modern analytical techniques and advances in philosophy.

The claim that something is old and has made lots of responses applies just as well to Catholic metaphysics. It doesn't make it immune to critique.

[Anonymous No.20104679]

It is technically Christianity but Swedenborg's religious ideas are the only ones that have appealed to me (as a fedora tipper). I would suggest reading Heaven and Hell, is very unique.

[Anonymous No.20104755]

My gateway drug to the Bible. Very good secular analysis that shows the multiple levels going on.

For philosophy, Hegel was the big break for me but Hegel is incredibly difficult and the commentary I used, Hegel's Ladder, is also very difficult.

Boehme, the Gnostics, Eckhart, Kabbalah (Schloem is a good intro) and Hermeticism all helped but I wouldn't start there because it took me years to make sense of it. Most talk here is obscurantist posturing unfortunately.

Learning about science and that "muh random life forming from random bouncing stuff in an objective universe," also helped. This hasn't been the view since Newtonian physics was replaced. Reading about quantum mechanics, self organization, thermodynamics, information theory, chaos theory, and their application to biology all helps.

Information—Consciousness—Reality summarizes a lot of this science.

[Anonymous No.20104803]

>>20104755
How do you read all this, acquire a presumably broad view of existence and still choose christianity, I cannot comprehend this mindset, no offense

[Anonymous No.20104907]

>>20104662
You have not read either of them have you?

>A Critique of Vedanta’ by L. V. Rajagopa
This is a critique of all the 3 main Vedanta schools from a Whiteheadian process perspective. There is very little information available about it online and its not on b-ok or lib-gen. It's hard for me to imagine or take seriously the idea of a Whiteheadian process-fan critiquing Advaita when Advaita conclusively shows with their arguments that foundational awareness is unchanging and not 'a process'.

>Advaita: A Contemporary Critique - by Srinivasa Rao
This is a funny case, right in the preface of the book he says a main aim of his book is not to critique Advaita as established by Shankara, and that it's largely the sundry interpretations by post-Shankara Advaitins coming up with their own competing theories that he is aiming at. E.G. as examples:

>The harmful effects of orthodoxy have actually multiplied manifold in the Indian environment and especially within Advaita Vedānta because of very subtle, but also very profound misunderstandings of the words and works of an outstanding original thinker like Śaṅkara by almost all his commentators. One of the chief purposes of this contemporary critique of Advaita is to precisely expose, examine and correct some of the most basic misunderstandings.
-preface
>This chapter gives an overview of how there was a defective stand about nonduality taken by Mandana Miśra which was corrected by Śankara, but how this corrected view itself came to be misunderstood and distorted by later followers of Śankara. The emphasis here is on how the essentially correct view of Śankara came to be misunderstood, transformed and twisted by his followers, leading to the development of a strong orthodoxy in Advaita
>-chapter 1: preliminaries

Despite this, at times he appears to be critiquing pan-Advaita views, but these are marred by very basic and even astonishing errors. To just take one error found in the chapter on Sadasadvilakṣaṇa and Asat

[Anonymous No.20104921]

>>20104662
>Thus it would turn out that at the empirical level, since objects do exist, there is duality. If this duality must be rooted out at the highest level, it has to be ensured that there just cannot be any object of any kind at that level. This means that there cannot be anything like what is called “other than sat and asat” (sadasadvilakṣaṇa) at that level. Therefore if the highest level alone is true, the traditional Advaitin must necessarily hold that what was earlier considered by him to be actually existing at the empirical level and was also very definitely regarded as the sadasadvilakṣaṇa is, in reality, absolutely non-existent. That is, in fact, it is no different at all from asat. Hence, the onto-logical status of what is regarded as sadasadvilakṣaṇa must now be retrospectively modified and changed to the status of asat. In short, the traditional Advaitin must effect a reduction of all sadasadvilakṣaṇa into asat. There is absolutely no escape at all for him from effecting such a final reduction. This reduction necessarily means that the very distinction between asat (absolute non-being) and the sadasadvilakṣaṇa (not absolute-being or absolute non-being) should now be regarded as completely invalid, untenable and as having been (p.115) wrongly conceived.
Here Rao seems very confused, he seems to think that acknowledging that maya is false entails an automatic reduction of it into nothingness or absolute non-being, because of the reason that falsity and non-being both differ from Absolute reality that is the Real, but maya is not the same as nothingness or non-being because maya can actually falsely appear in experience while non-being has no capacity to appear to us in experience. Rao's justification for this is that "Therefore if the highest level alone is true, the traditional Advaitin must necessarily hold that what was earlier considered by him to be actually existing at the empirical level and was also very definitely regarded as the sadasadvilakṣaṇa is, in reality, absolutely non-existent. That is, in fact, it is no different at all from asat." His crucial mistake here is to treat "non-existent at the absolute level" as consequently entailing "non-existent at the empirical level" when this doesn't follow at all, something false like an illusion is such because it can present itself in empirical experience while lacking absolute being. Saying that the appearance isn't real *on the level of* the absolute reality of Brahman doesn't mean that down at the level of conventional experience, it's not still a false appearance. Saying that the snake-appearance isn't real isn't to say that we still aren't perceiving or perceived a snake in experience, which cannott occur with nothingness.

[Anonymous No.20104926]

>>20104662
>>20104921

TLDR: It's like he's saying "logic entails that relative being/falsity and nothingness become completely identical if you say neither are absolute reality" which is incorrect because each still possesses their own distinct quality or nature (or the negation of all qualities/everything in the case of nothingness) that separates them from each other, so you cannot even affirm false appearances and nothingness to be the same in principle as Rao does without violating logical laws like the LNC when you try to say "an appearance (falsity) and the negation/absence of everything including appearances (nothingness) are the same". This is a very basic mistake to make, I'm surprised that this was even published by oxford.

[Anonymous No.20104958]

>>20104907
Why don't you try actually reading critiques instead of flipping through randomly so that you can claim "all criticism is necissarily due to misunderstanding!"

There is, presumably, a reason this metaphysics has not been recognized as the one true metaphysics.

A common critique is that the role of Maya falls into the excluded middle, and becomes metaphysically meaningless (this also shows up in Indian thought, but without the formalism).

Guanons always seem so incredibly fragile.

[Anonymous No.20104967]

>>20104926
The key word in your post reflect on is logical.

Something that is both true and false is not consistent with logic. You can have fuzzy logic, but this is methodologically recent and focuses on modality for the most part

[Anonymous No.20105082]

>>20104624
>What kind of eastern philosophy did you read?
The main books that influenced that belief were the Tao Te Ching and Zhuang zi.
> I haven't read Spinoza yet, where did you start with him?
Ethics
>What do you make of pantheism vs. panentheism?
pantheism appeals more to me simple as. Panentheism makes me feel excluded and I don't like that.

>What makes unable to believe in religion is mostly the symbolism though, or rather the arbitrary systems which perennialists see as tools but that I just see as inventions.
Exploring the origins of symbolism helped me. Similar to anon's recommendation of Guenon, reading Robert Sapolsky (Behave) explaining how every civilisation develops religion and religious similarities (like symbols and making symmetric patterns) and how this might be biological helped me be more accepting of what Viktor Frank said about the ¨Unconscious god¨ and ¨how even the atheist has a need to surpass god¨. In the end I feel that religion is more about the human need to believe in good>evil and is very personal, Dostoyevsky helps with this even if you aren't Christian. Calling that need ¨religion¨ and believing on symbols (that don't appeal to me lol) made by others puts me off too, My character (and yours?) is just more disagreeable about this. Sapolsky mentions how religion doesn't become doctrine to rule others until a civilisation gets big enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI#t=4752

[Anonymous No.20105111]

>>20104958
>Why don't you try actually reading critiques instead of flipping through randomly so that you can claim "all criticism is necessarily due to misunderstanding!"
I did read through a number of them, the first 2 or 3 that I read were all critiques of the idiosyncratic formulations of post-Shankara Advaitins and were not critiques of Advaita as formulated by Shankara. When I finally came across critiques of Advaita by Rao that could be seen as applying to Shankara's Advaita and not only post-Shankara individuals, the errors in what Rao wrote immediately stood out to me. So I decided to pick a decent example of that which wouldn't require 20 pages of autistic analysis and shared it with the thread. I honestly don't think Rao identifies a single real problem with Advaita as far as I'm seen (I have not read the whole book but the signs so far are not looking good) but it looks like he misunderstands Advaita doctrines to mean something else aside from what Shankara means, and then Rao criticizes his own mistakes. Sorry to spoil your long-awaited dream of someone finally demonstrating a problem in Advaita but Rao doesn't do so either.

>There is, presumably, a reason this metaphysics has not been recognized as the one true metaphysics.
Yes, not all humans are equally endowed with the capacity for metaphysical insight/realization, just like not all humans have the same IQ and math skills, plus karma from past lives impacts our current actions and spiritual inclinations.

>A common critique is that the role of Maya falls into the excluded middle
Advaitins already answered that over a millennium ago, kek. The Law of Excluded Middle is not violated by Maya because, 'absolutely real' and 'absolutely unreal' are not exhaustive and admit of the third alternative, the ‘relatively real’ to which belong all world-objects. In order to claim that this answer is wrong you'd have assert that there is no such thing as a difference between absolute being and relative being or falsity (same thing) and hence that there is only being and non-being full-stop; but this conclusion is exactly what the argument sets out to prove and so you can't cite that as your reasoning to demonstrate that or it's the logical fallacy of circular reasoning which renders that argument fallacious. You may reply that the Advaitin hasn't offered proof of his absolute being / falsity / absolute non-being triad model; but that's besides the point since its incumbent on those wishing to refute Advaita doctrines to demonstrate a logical contradiction in them *already as they are*, and the non-offering of proof of the triad isn't a logical contradiction.

>>20104967
>Something that is both true and false is not consistent with logic.
I agree, fortunately Shankara's Advaita doesn't ever say that something is both true and false, which you would know if you had read the primary sources or took a serious look at any halfway decent secondary source

[Anonymous No.20105182]

>>20104755
I don't remember much about the Corpus Hermeticum been awhile since I've read it

[Anonymous No.20105323]

>>20105111
Every argument with a Guanon is the same.
>You haven't read it. Everyone who reads Sankara has the same opinion if they understand it correctly and finds nothing wanting.
>Disagreements between adherents don't exist. There totally isn't multiple competing sects within the umbrella of Advaita historically, including a move into real dualism. Some of the adherents aren't talking about real Advaita, which just happens to be the Advaita exported to the West that became the major exposure to Hinduism that Europeans had in the 19th-early 20th century. Advaita has conquered all comers in India and yet somehow Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions make up like 90% of Hindus.
>Any analysis using formal logic is invalid because Westerners can't understand Hindu thought and neither can Hindus who study modern philosohical methods (except our hero obviously).

It's like Trad Caths calling Protestants non-Christians. Except worse, it's more like a Baptist denying Lutherans and Anglicans are Protestants but then claiming all Protestants are Baptists.

[Anonymous No.20105430]

>>20105111
>Law of Excluded Middle is not violated by Maya because, 'absolutely real' and 'absolutely unreal' are not exhaustive and admit of the third alternative, the ‘relatively real’ to which belong all world-objects.

It is true that X is real.
It is false that X is real.

These are your two options if you're not going to violate the principle of bivalence. When making propositions that always hold, as is the case when talking about the nature of reality, the law of the excluded middle entails the principal of bivalence (as opposed to in modal statements)

These are the options for avoiding the excluded middle. You can modify your propositions with any number of contingencies, definitions, etc.to add nuance. You can do all sorts of things to be flexible. Unary symbols exist to denote moral obligations with deontic squares, or modal diamonds. You can use temporal logic for time based propositions, there exists systems for epistemic modalities dealing with certainty.

This is true by definition. That the excluded middle does not include ontological systems with relative truth values is pretty much tautological (unless you have a very strange system where your ontological primitives shift over time).


>Yes, not all humans are equally endowed with the capacity for metaphysical insight/realization, just like not all humans have the same IQ and math skills, plus karma from past lives impacts our current actions and spiritual inclinations.

I concede. I am too inferior.

[Anonymous No.20105499]

>>20105430
Obviously you can try to get out of this by stating that "realness" is actually a relative state. The problem here is that introducing relative states of being essentially erodes your ability to use the correspondence definition of truth because now propositions like "Theseus is standing," are about things that are relatively in the world. Coherence epistemology isn't going to work here either because your truth bearers can now be partially real.

Maybe you could work it into some form of pragmatism, but that is going to undermine the truth status of the ontology.

The problem here is the relationship between being/existing and being true in epistemology isn't the same as being hot or cold, or being complex or simple.

Obviously it still works as a religion. A major point of religions is to build a story around the things that are illogical that nonetheless seem meaningful. Paradox has its own import. Great religious/spiritual texts are full of contradictions.

You just can't claim it's good philosohical metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.20105587]

>>20104803
>>20104803
I grew up in an areligious, really atheist household. I was an atheist for a long time, eventually trending towards agnostic.

I am not sure I would call myself a Christian. The term means different things to different people and presupposes a ton of dogmas I find ridiculous.

My move towards studying the Bible, Church history, and theology was after I met my wife and started getting dragged to church. I've been to a lot of different kinds of churches. I move a lot and it takes awhile for me to find one sufficiently undogmatic.

Anyhow, I found the topic interesting but really didn't buy into it. What turned the corner for me was reading Hegel. A lot of commentators want to denude Hegel of all spirituality. This seems patently ridiculous to me, although people who hold this position still have some quality treatments.

Hegel's unorthodox "faith" posits an Absolute, coming into being through the world. He draws a lot from the mystic Jacob Boehme.

A main takeaway from Boehme is this: we know there is being (becoming) because we're here (the Cartesian cognito). A key question then is, how did God have being before creation, before time?

Behemism says God couldn't have being in that period. Genesis starts with "In the beginning," a begining that coincided with creation for a reason. Because if there is only one thing, God, how can God have any meaning. An infinite string of ones carries no information in the same way an infinite string of zeros lacks information. As Sausser says, "a one word language is impossible," because if one word carries equal reference to all things, it denotes nothing.

In Boehme, this means God's knowledge of God is frustrated. God cannot define God. God must posit another, must create, in order to be defined, hence creation and time.

Hegel builds up a similar story, starting with a thought experiment on human experience. Pure sense certainty has no definiteness. You don't see dogs or sheep or trees. There is only a now, devoid of interpretation. But this pure, undefined sensory stream lacks all meaning, and so is itself pure abstraction. This pure being is contradicted by the pure nothing of its content in terms of meaning. The contradiction results in being sublating nothing and incorporating it into itself. The result is becoming. We experience a now of being that falls away continually into nothing. The new concept entails both, the beingness of being in "now" and the nothing of nothing in the falling away of "now," which is then replaced by another "now" of being.

This dialectical, where certain things must exist necissarily to define others, carries right on into physics.

Complex systems (self-organizing systems, far from equilibrium dynamical systems, life) can only exist between the entropic extremes of order and chaos. Too much or too little entropy and you don't get complexity.

[Anonymous No.20105662]

>>20105587

The takeaway for me is that complexity only exists in the gap between order and chaos, on the fringes. It's very dialectical that way. Being and nothing stand in contradiction, so we have becoming, the continuous transition of being into the nothingness of the past. As Penrose shows, when your reach either end of the entropy scale, the heat death of the universe, or the pre-Big Bang singularity state, the formal mathematical descriptions becomes increasingly identical. So then, we also have order and chaos standing in contradiction, undefinable in their absolute states, and so we get complexity within becoming as a secondary synthesis.

Notably, the tendency toward entropy enforces natural selection on self organizing systems. The emergence of progressivly greater complexity in life, life that stores more information about the world and has more computational power, is all dictated by these dialectical necessities.

I won't go into how information in physical since it takes a while to explain. You can look up Shannon Entropy and get a quick run down.

Now Terrance Deacon has some good work on the relationship between Shannon Entropy and Boltzmann Entropy that presents a decent framework for how information can be physical, even at high levels of abstraction and meaning for us as humans.

My guess is that there is a relationship between the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity and the fact that computational systems can and often do represent violations of physical laws, which is how our thoughts can have the freedom they do, since we rely on computation (also, Kolmogorov Complexity will be less for any non-random strong than the Shannon Entropy in terms of bits of storage).

You can Google "It From Bit" on how information can be seen as the real stuff of reality.

Point of all of the above being, it makes the world look a lot like Boehme and Hegel were on to something.

Christianity is relevant in its historical context in a Hegelian sense, which is too much to get into here.

I find the tripartite God essential because it allows God to complete the Piercean semiotic triangle and have meaning within Itself.

Christ, the Logos, is a symbol. It proceeds from the Referent, which is the ground of being, the Father, which is the Object. The Holy Spirit is the Interpretant. Since being requires meaning, since pure unmitigated input is pure abstraction, which is no different from nothing (biting off Hegel here), it represents the essential requirement for being qua being.

[Anonymous No.20105691]

>>20105662
Christ being the Logos has way more import when you read the term as implied by Philo of Alexandria, or Greek conceptions of the Logos as universal reason, logic, or the underlying structure of being/meaning (e.g. Heraclitus and the tension of opposites, which not surprisingly Logocentric Gnostics picked up on in the structure of the Ogdoad).

Paul is says something very complex in Romans 7-8. He is rejecting the Cartesian I, and identifying a plurality of drives and desires, like Hume would do much later (or Greek and Indian thinkers had already done). But he follows Aristotle in a sort of ordering of these parts, with the drives of the body being lower, leading to Sin, which kills Paul ("dead in sin"), while the higher part wants to do good and follow God. This higher part seems identified with the intellect, and that makes sense in light of other commentaries. In commentaries on Genesis (Strauss and Kass are excellent), man's creation in the image of God is generally not taken to mean God is a featherless biped. It's that man, although living in the world, within the circuit of cause and effect that grounds the world, also apprehends the universal laws the rule it. That's man's share of the Logos, and we see this in John too, that the Logos is the "light of the world" and the light is "within men."

But for Paul, the members of his flesh overwhelm this part of the self, resulting in death. Freedom requires the apprehension of what moves one, and this requires knowledge and reason. We die to sin, the legion of desires, which plays a role effectively similar to the demons who call themselves Legion who rule a man in Matthew. Christ casts out the demons in Mathew. In Romans 8, Paul speaks of us being ressurected in Christ. After losing our personhood to that which moves us which is not of us, we are brought to life in the Logos. But there is also this trickier role of the Spirit.

The Spirit is less defined but I've come to see that as the essential nature of being that is Being experiencing Itself as Other. Being is a sort of Atman, but just as the Logos within man is fragmentary, a small portion, so too is our share in the Spirit. To avoid slavery to the world, we seek the higher will (I Peter 4), but the real goal is revelation, which is the Spirit, the Absolute.

That is, Christianity is ultimately a story about freedom, freedom through recognition of causality and the nature of the Absolute.

The mythological elements work for some people. The Bible works on many different levels, having different things for different people.

As a powerful historical moment in the progress of the Absolute (the dialectical applies to political order to, Fukuyama is a decent intro on this, although it misses a lot), the Bible and Christianity have a great significance.

[Anonymous No.20105718]

>>20104803
Why would one not 'choose' (?) christianity?

Even those perennialists (Guénon, Schuon, AKC, Titus, Pallis, Whitall Perry et al) who studied many traditions believed in the validity of christianity. They were all very fond of christianity and Ananda loved to quote St. Paul and St. Augustine (along with Eckhart).

Schuon wrote:
>The Catholic saints have nothing for which to envy the bhaktas of India.

Ananda's son wrote:
>Tough outwardly it has been primarily bhaktic or devotional in character, Christianity contains legitimate and essential elements which Coomaraswamy, for one, has compared to “an Upanishad of Europe”. Christianity is a full Revelation, addressed to a particular sector of humanity; our task, as “workers of the eleventh hour” is to fathom its profundities once again insofar as this may be possible and, hopefully, sense something of That which led St Paul to exclaim: “O the depth of the riches, the wisdom and the knowledge of God!” (Rom xi, 33).

Guénon wrote:
>The homage rendered in this way to the new-born Christ by the authentic representatives of the primordial tradition in the three worlds which are their respective domains, is at the same time, we should clearly note, the assurance of the perfect orthodoxy of Christianity in this respect.

and Ananda himself said he would have been a catholic had he been born in the west. Path his son ended up choosing (though he was a sedevacantist).

It appears that you are not well read enough to recognize in christianity (as kept by the catholic church) its orthodoxy even perennialists acknowledged

[Anonymous No.20105723]

>>20105323
cope

>>20105430
>It is true that X is real.
>It is false that X is real
>These are your two options if you're not going to violate the principle of bivalence. When making propositions that always hold, as is the case when talking about the nature of reality, the law of the excluded middle entails the principal of bivalence (as opposed to in modal statements)
What Advaita is talking about is not violating the principle of bivalence, I'm not sure why you thought otherwise, do you have a specific example of Advaita doing so? Because you never cited one in your post

The triad model of Advaita entails saying that:
1) Reality/Brahman is true, its not false or nothingness
2) Falsity/maya is false, its not true or nothingness
3) nothingness is completely non-existent and it's meaningless to speak of it as true or false, depending on what the proposition you ask about nothingness the correct answer changes in response (e.g. its false to say nothingness exists, its true to say it does not exist)

This is not violating the principle of bivalence because it's not assigning two different truth values as both being valid for the same proposition with regard to maya or anything else in Advaita.

>>20105499
>Obviously you can try to get out of this by stating that "realness" is actually a relative state
Get out of what? you never clearly identified what the issue is, maybe this was by design because you weren't sure exactly what it was but just had an intuition
>The problem here is that introducing relative states of being essentially erodes your ability to use the correspondence definition of truth because now propositions like "Theseus is standing," are about things that are relatively in the world.
There is no issue at all if you just understand that speaking about things on an empirical level isn't the same as speaking about them in an Absolute sense viz. their ultimate ontological status. Speaking about completely different perspectives requires different usage of language. Another series of terms can be invented for the other perspective but it's unnecessary. There is no contradiction in saying that "in absolute reality there is no multitude of people and objects, but within maya it's conventionally or empirically true that Theseus is standing". Similarly, by transposition one could also say without contradiction "in the waking state, there are no dream people, but within the dream it's conventionally or empirically true that there are dream people".

>because your truth bearers can now be partially real.
Advaita doesn't recognize the concept of "partially real" as being valid to begin with, the Real admits of no adulteration or admixture. The false or maya is not "partially real"

[Anonymous No.20105927]

>>20105723
And before you reply with "but how can you say that Advaita doesn't admit the concept of partially real when you say that something is conventionally or empirically true?", I will answer that for you preemptively: Saying that something is "conventionally true or empirically true" for Advaita is tantamount to saying "it is experienced, or present as an object of experience, but it is metaphysically false, as are all objects of experience by their very nature", in other words, saying something is conventionally true on the empirical level isn't saying something is true ontologically, and isn't saying that it partakes or shares of what is metaphysically Real or True.

It's not admitting a partial truth to say that "It's conventionally-true or empirically-correct that Theseus is standing" or "Theseus and all objects are metaphysically false" because each statement is fully correct in the context in which they are used. The first is just saying "it's correctly describing experience to say that there is an epistemic experience of the perception of Theseus doing x, regardless of the ontological status of that" and the second is saying "it's correctly describing the ontological status of Theseus to say that he is metaphysically false along with all maya-objects". Assenting to describing the sight of Theseus as "empirically experienced, but metaphysically false" does not entail making the category of "empirically experienced, but metaphysically false" itself into a "partial truth".

When Advaitins say "conventionally true", they aren't importing back down to the conventional level their same notion of the absolute Truth as That which is eternal, independent, non-sublatable, unchanging etc that is at the absolute level alone and hence they are not using the same concept in the same manner in two contradictory instances; they are instead just following the common language of how people normally speak in order to make themselves more understandable, so that every statement talking about empirical matters doesn't have to be followed with endless qualifications about how X is false ultimately. Whenever they say "conventionally true" it's implicit that the "true" part in that formulation has nothing to do with the absolute Truth, but is just "in accordance with (metaphysically false) experience", You can correctly describe false things without that act making them true (like recounting a dream to someone), asking "is it true" about empirical matters just means for Advaitins "does this proposition describe the metaphysically false world or does it not?" It doesn't mean "is this empirical matter the absolute Truth"

[Anonymous No.20105959]

>>20104324

>Conceives of the idea that materialism is an incorrect philosophical view
>Writes a book about the idea which consists of physical material and which can be desired as a commodity which may be purchased with money

[Anonymous No.20106012]

>>20105718
Anyone who has dived deeply into Trinitarian theology is bound to find eastern theology a bit superficial.

[Anonymous No.20106024]

>>20106012
I agree. I stand with Zaehner on this. The mysticism of sufis and indians is lacking in grace. I.e. they are natural efforts

[Anonymous No.20106298]

>>20105927
>Bivalence
>Only two values, true or false
>Refutation has to put the words in scare quotes and throw all sorts of modifiers on them.

You can have truth statements about fictions. So, that's aside the point. 'Hector is killed by Achilles" can have a truth value.

The problem here is that, in Sankara at least, there is an explicit ontic status for Maya. He wants to have epistemological realism and have objects be illusory. He explicitly rejects the "non-existence" of objects, but then calls them illusion within a page.

Here is the common argument.

https://theologicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/jisca/01-1_105.pdf

This isn't new, other Vendata scholars specifically challenged and modified this point.

Or IDK, just stick to your dogma and assume there is in fact no diversity of opinion in an ancient philosohical school.

[Anonymous No.20106347]

>>20104324
while it's a christian apology, I quite liked chesterson's orthodoxy. check out chapter 2 for a nice rejection of materialism

[Anonymous No.20106482]

>>20106298
>>Bivalence
>>Only two values, true or false
Yes, Advaita says that specific propositions are true or false. The explanation of maya does not violate the bivalence principle, as already explained. Maya is just straight up false, which is one value (and not 2!). Just saying "hur dur muh bivalence" isnt enough to show that the doctrine of maya violates it, you actually have to point out specifically *how* , what are the two truth values you are (falsely) alleging that Advaita affirms about something? Don't be coy
>>Refutation has to put the words in scare quotes and throw all sorts of modifiers on them.
That's not a rebuttal of anything I wrote but is just a vague complaint. I used quotes around certain terms for the sake of clarity, because I'm making a subtle point when talking about the different way language can be used for ontology and epistemology, and how accepting the crowds sense of the word 'true' for the purposes of nominal discourse isn't the same as conflating that sense with absolute metaphysical truth. Is your argument now that no nuance is allowed in philosophy or language?
>The problem here is that, in Sankara at least, there is an explicit ontic status for Maya.
That's wholly incorrect, the only thing that there is explicit or implicit ontic status for in Shankara's works is Consciousness alone.

[Anonymous No.20106487]

>>20104324
>and the rebuttal essay, Why Baloney is Materialism.

[Anonymous No.20106491]

>>20106482
>>20106298
>He wants to have epistemological realism and have objects be illusory.
There is no contradiction whatsoever unless you have no idea what he means or unless you've confused epistemology and ontology, when Shankara says that he means objects are metaphysically illusory in the sense of not being absolute reality, they are not a part of absolute reality or taking place in absolute reality. His epistemological realism consists of saying that within the realm of the metaphysically-false that is maya, the world of experience is independent of our brain and sense-organs perceiving and also has other brains perceiving it, that it's not just all the delusion of one brain, and that our sense organs etc provide empirically valid knowledge of this metaphysically-false world. This is in sharp contrast to both subjective idealism and ontological realism.

There is no contradiction here because epistemic instruments can still provide us with epistemically valid information about a shared world of experience independent of our individual brains that is metaphysically false by virtue of not being absolute reality. That eyes and ears etc might provide us with transactionally-valid info about the world that has practical value does nothing to negate the question of whether that world is metaphysically false or not, a shadow of some absolute reality. They are two different questions and so the two positions do not negate or contradict the other but are completely and perfectly compatible.

"Shankara believes in epistemic realism and ontological idealism. He is equally opposed to subjective idealism (like Yogachara) and ontological realism (atomism etc). For him, the empirical reality of this world of subject-object duality cannot be denied nor can its ultimate reality be upheld. The world is empirically real and transcendentally unreal. It would be absurd to suppose that Shankara, while criticising Buddhist idealism, compromises with his own idealism or becomes a realist or uses the arguments of realism in which he himself does not believe. Shankara accepts and defends only epistemic realism as it is not incompatible with his absolute idealism."
- C. Sharma, "The Advaita Tradition in Indian Philosophy"

>This isn't new, other Vendata scholars specifically challenged and modified this point.
Yes, because they didn't actually read his works and so they confused an epistemological question with an ontological one, but as I explained above when you understand that one is an epistemological claim about experience and the other is an ontological claim about ultimate reality there *is* no contradiction.

[Anonymous No.20106930]

>>20106024
Theology of grace is sadly missing entirely in Eastern philosophy. Salvation is almost entirely due to mans efforts, the divine is passive, almost an afterthought, something to be obtained rather than assimilated to.

[Anonymous No.20107078]

>>20105718
>christianity is good because perennialists say so
Where's your argument? Fuck, you people always miss the point so fucking hard.

Is there some kind of anti-perennialism out there? i.e. the stance that instead of all religions pointing towards truth, none of them do?

[Anonymous No.20107097]

>>20107078
Another thread ruined by the guenon faggot

[Anonymous No.20107123]

>>20107078
>christianity is good because perennialists say so
Yes. What's the issue here? The perennialists are quite obviously right.

[Anonymous No.20107148]

>>20107123
No, they're not. Like any other system, their premises can be rejected. You're so caught up in those systems that you became blind to what "objectively" means

[Anonymous No.20107162]

>>20107148
I said obviously not objectively, this makes me doubt your ability to read and comprehend if you fuck up reading a 4chan post let alone works of esoteric philosophy

[Anonymous No.20107164]

>>20105691
Hegel and Boehme would be considered heretics by the overwhelming majority of churches/denominations. This kind of post-hoc rationalization of Christianity is unnecessary, much like there is no ontological necessity for the triune god. Neoplatonism provides a sufficient framework for those who want their beliefs to be solidly grounded in rational inquiry, there is no reason to believe in the events of the Bible and in its mythology.

[Anonymous No.20107177]

>>20107162
>I said obviously not objectively
I'm aware. Way to miss the point once again.
This is why it's probably pointless to discuss these subjects on /lit/. Everyone here latches onto some system and starts believing they found absolute truth through dry logical expositions, and lashes out when confronted to the idea that their system is just yet another failed attempt to rationalize something ineffable by tacking unnecessary (but aesthetically or "rationally" appealing), arbitrary characteristics onto it. No, your system isn't any less guilty of this than anyone else's just because it tries (and fails) to reconcile several systems into one.

[Anonymous No.20107180]

>>20107177
Your pseudo intellectual gibberish about "systems" is not compelling in the slightest and you are not a free thinker, nor is any criticism of systems of thought or worldviews novel, interesting or even relevant to the discussion at hand.

[Anonymous No.20107185]

>>20107162
>>20107180
You're the real pseudo-intellectual pretentious asshole rn.

[Anonymous No.20107193]

>>20107185
New aged unwashed hippie nonsense about people latching on to "systems" is simply boring and anti-intellectual. The type of thing that people who cannot understand true transcendence try to spout off about because they lack the ability to reach the higher levels of understanding of the nous through reason.

I encourage you to put forward your own positive thoughts about the One, but I highly discourage you from talking about "systems" you clearly lack the ability to comprehend let alone critique.

[Anonymous No.20107201]

>>20107180
I accept your concession. Now go shill your trite garbage elsewhere.

[Anonymous No.20107215]

>>20107193
> people who cannot understand true transcendence try to spout off about because they lack the ability to reach the higher levels of understanding
You perfectly described yourself and your laughably narrow beliefs. I don't expect you to understand, you're in too deep to possibly realize you've been buying into arbitrary bullshit all this time, but just leave the thread, you're contributing nothing aside from tedious, meaningless rants about advaita and how "all religions are fundamentally the same maaan" (then accusing people of being new agers, kek)
You are the archetypal pseudointellectual, impressionable 20-something who thinks he's figured everything out. This board has too many clowns like you, just stay in whichever containment thread you crawled out of and stop embarrassing yourself

[Anonymous No.20107217]

>>20107164
>there is no reason to believe in the events of the Bible and in its mythology.
Augustine was the greatest Neoplatonist of his time and disagrees. Neoplatonism is beautiful but lacks the heart of Christianity, the divine love, God himself sacrificing himself for man. Neoplatonism alone cannot satiate the soul because it's cold rationality is not tempered by a way of knowing God truly loves you, as Christianity shows by the incarnation.

[Anonymous No.20107219]

>>20104324
>thread that explicitly asks for things that are not Hinduism or Christianity
>almost all replies are retards shilling their brand of Hinduism or Christianity that's totally different and worth looking into dude trust me
lol

[Anonymous No.20107221]

>>20107215
>I don't expect you to understand, you're in too deep to possibly realize you've been buying into arbitrary bullshit all this time
You have literally said absolutely nothing of what you actually believe and at this point I'm sure you lack the ability to express whatever nonsensical position you have, instead resorting into saying other people are "in to deep" to recognize your insights (which of course you'll never actually elaborate on since you're completely full of shit)

[Anonymous No.20107223]

>>20107217
>God himself sacrificing himself for man
I have always found this incoherent and frankly not compelling at all. Reading the Gospels did not change my mind about it.
How does your argument in favor of Christianity not boil down to "it makes me feel better than Neoplatonism"?

[Anonymous No.20107227]

>>20107221
Stop derailing the thread with your personal beliefs nobody cares about or asked for please

[Anonymous No.20107228]

>>20104324
>I've seen pic related recommended, is it good?
yes it's a good introduction into idealism

[Anonymous No.20107230]

>>20107223
It's about beauty. Beauty is truth and truth is beauty. The beauty of the idea is the validity of it's truth. It's not about feelings it's about the fact that Neoplatonism has absolutely no grounding in truth and is merely an idea unless grounded in the historical fact of Christs resurrection.

[Anonymous No.20107236]

>>20107230
>The beauty of the idea is the validity of it's truth
What if I don't find the idea beautiful at all?
>Neoplatonism has absolutely no grounding in truth
But neither does Christianity.

[Anonymous No.20107240]

>>20107236
>But neither does Christianity.
It does from the fact that Christ rose from the dead, proving the truth of his claims. No pagan apologist disputed the truth of the resurrection because it was indisputable, they instead tried to claim Jesus was a sorcerer.

[Anonymous No.20107241]

>>20107240
>the fact that Christ rose from the dead
I don't believe this happened. It's not a fact, it's just your belief

[Anonymous No.20107244]

>>20107241
I don't believe you exist. It's not a fact. Just your belief.

This is sophistry.

[Anonymous No.20107251]

>>20107244
Yeah okay I'm not going to get anything of value out of you

[Anonymous No.20107255]

>>20107193
You just formulated the most based take on reality.

[Anonymous No.20107257]

>>20105587
>>20105662
>>20105691
>>20107164
Anon you are unironically going through a metaphysical intoxication. Seek help before you end up like Phillip K. Dick.

[Anonymous No.20107260]

>>20107251
Saying "I don't believe it" is not an argument. What you do or do not believe is completely irrelevant to the fact of Christs resurrection. You can believe the moon is made of cheese for all it matters.

[Anonymous No.20107262]

>>20107257
What getting lost in manmade concepts and words does to a mf

[Anonymous No.20107266]

>>20107260
>the fact of Christs resurrection
Prove it

[Anonymous No.20107272]

>>20107244
>>20107260
>Saying "I don't believe it" is not an argument. What you do or do not believe is completely irrelevant to the fact of Christs resurrection. You can believe the moon is made of cheese for all it matters.
>I don't believe you exist. It's not a fact. Just your belief.
The thing is - if the anon there or anyone else stops believing in Resurrection then it's supposed reality is not going to affect him or anything else in the mortal world in any way at all.

However many times you say that anon does not exists, he still keeps calling you a faggot.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

[Anonymous No.20107280]

>>20107272
This dude unironically believes the king of jews coming back to life is a demonstrable historical fact, he's beyond saving.

[Anonymous No.20107284]

>>20107262
Can't help but burrow from Wittgenstein here - this route of thinking starts from making assumptions about the nature of logic and information (especially that A: they exist, and B: they are true since they seem true), and from that inevitably arrives to the conclusion that nothing else actually exists, and it's all functions and emanations of pure logic. The process can naturally be reduced to "if the world is nothing but predicates and their relations, then the world is nothing but predicates and their relations".

A really damn long path to produce a tautology that seems really sensible to whoever comes up with it. Christcucks at least take a shorter path and have wine.

[Anonymous No.20107287]

>>20107280
>This dude unironically believes the king of jews coming back to life is a demonstrable historical fac
Actually no - I think he approaches it from a different paradigm.

[Anonymous No.20107289]

>>20107287
What paradigm?

[Anonymous No.20107290]

>>20107272
>The thing is - if the anon there or anyone else stops believing in Resurrection then it's supposed reality is not going to affect him
Is that actually true? I'm sure materialists think this but we're circling back into retardo atheist presupposition territory where the argument is "The resurrection doesn't affect me because my metaphysical presuppositions are correct and I face no final judgement".

[Anonymous No.20107296]

>>20107290
>The resurrection doesn't affect me because my metaphysical presuppositions are correct and I face no final judgement
And your assumption, that is, "my metaphysical presuppositions are erect and I face final judgment" are just as ridiculous; more so, in fact.
I'm not an atheist by the way.

[Anonymous No.20107298]

Read the Enneads

[Anonymous No.20107300]

>>20107296
>erect
Correct* kek

[Anonymous No.20107310]

[Anonymous No.20107317]

[Anonymous No.20107624]

>>20107290
>Is that actually true?
It is, since the Final Judgement and the Kingdom of Christ do not concern this reality: they canonically cannot be seen, known, understood or predicted. You can only _live_ your way to them, but otherwise they are beyond any inquiry according to the Christian dogma itself.

[Anonymous No.20107881]

Bump

[Anonymous No.20107943]

>>20104324
I'm reading Erich Fromm's 'The Art of Being' and I'm thoroughly enjoying it

It's very readable, and its written from a very humble perspective. While influences are taken from Western/Eastern religions as well as psychology and philosophy, one is never championed as the one 'true' solution.

Everything in Fromm's circle is taken as an inspiration for his outlook, in which he argues that happiness involves the achievement of a few 'objective' things, making happiness objective rather than subjective.

He takes a lot of time to explain a lot of prescient ideas regarding our anxieties and frustrations with mortality and freedom, and how we often use distractors like materialism to avoid them. Finally, he spends a lot of time explaining forms of meditation and personal reflection as ways to endure and grow.

[Anonymous No.20107981]

>>20106491
>Centuries of Vendata scholars didn't read Sankara.
>But I know the essential truth because I read Guenon.

You can keep restating that epistemological truth can have two levels and it won't change the fact you cannot have one true truth that is negated by another truth. That means what is true in your system is actually false.

This is fixable by just dropping the fixation on saying Maya is a sort of real falsity and just calling it untrue fiction. Arguably though, the contradiction is the mystical/religious core of the doctrine. Otherwise it's not really any different from modern physicalism is supposing an illusory form of experience, juxtaposed with a true ontological reality.

[Anonymous No.20108002]

>>20106482
>Maya is just straight up false, which is one value (and not 2!)

This is explicitly not Sankara. This is indeed a later innovation introduced to fix the contradiction.

If Maya is just illusion, there is no need for a two level epistemology. Physicalism does not have a two level epistemology but admits illusion.

You seem unfamiliar with sort of the basics on metaphysics here. When you read on SEP or Wikipedia or various other overviews that the doctrine requires a "two tiered epistemology" this should immediately tip you off that we are not just making true or false statements about someone's perceptions, but dealing with something different. In this case it is a realism towards objects in Maya that is true but ultimately untrue.

In many ways this is sort of the beauty of the whole thing. When you take it out, it becomes like any other monism, but it is also contradictory and so not great metaphysis, but mystical work is by nature normally bad metaphysics.

You might be getting tripped up by Guenon here because in his words, metaphysics for him is abstracted theology. This is not what the term generally means, and to some degree you can fault him for using an inappropriate term as an appeal to authority, but that's kind of aside the point.

[Anonymous No.20108189]

>>20107981
>>But I know the essential truth because I read Guenon.
I know what Shankara's positions actually were because I've actually read him, and I can detect someone bullshitting and pretending to know what they are talking about from miles away, and I can tell that you are a shameless bullshitter, at least when it comes to speaking about Hindu philosophy.
>You can keep restating that epistemological truth can have two levels
I'm not and I never said that once, you don't even have a citation of one of my sentences to prove that. Epistemological truth is its own truth, and ontological truth is its own truth; what Advaita is talking about is NOT there being two truths on the level of epistemology, but that each is a separate truth in its own sphere, all epistemological truths on the level of mundane empirical experience for Advaita are automatically metaphysically/ontologically false; this is not saying that epistemological truth has two levels that abide at the level of the epistemic, it says that there is an ultimate ontological truth (Brahman) and then on the epistemic level there are epistemic truths.
>and it won't change the fact you cannot have one true truth that is negated by another truth.
It *is* contradictory to say one truth is negated by another if both are actually true as ontological realities, but when one truth is not an actual truth but is a falsehood, then there is no contradiction in saying that falsehood is contradicted by truth, and in fact this is the only logically-consistent way of relating truth and falsehood, what is false must necessarily be negated by what is true. This is what Advaita is talking about, the metaphysically-false (maya) is negated by the metaphysically true (Brahman).
>This is fixable by just dropping the fixation on saying Maya is a sort of real falsity and just calling it untrue fiction.
Advaita doesn't say that Maya is a real falsity, they say that it is an empirically-experienced metaphysical-falsity; saying maya is empirically-experienced isn't the same as calling it metaphysically-real, but you seem to be confusing the former as involving the latter when it actually doesn't.
>Arguably though, the contradiction is the mystical/religious core of the doctrine.
There is no contradiction in how it's formulated by Shankara, you just keep confusing between the level of empirical vs ontological and assuming that to say "experienced" = "real", all of your errors are corrected in any halfway decent book on Advaita, like C. Sharma's "The Advaita Tradition" (read it and get back to me if you want to stop showing off your ignorance)

[Anonymous No.20108206]

>>20108002
>Maya is just straight up false, which is one value (and not 2!)
>This is explicitly not Sankara. This is indeed a later innovation introduced to fix the contradiction.
LOL, that's completely wrong, this is found in Shankara whenever he is speaking on an absolute (ontological level) about maya, as for example in his commentary on Bhagavad-Gita verse 2.16. which both the tradition and western academics consider authentic:

Shankara: As configurations like pot etc. are unreal since they are not perceived to be different from earth when tested by the eyes, so also are all changeful things (all of maya) unreal because they are not perceived to be different from their (material causes), and also because they are not perceived before (their) origination and after destruction.

Objection: If it be that such causes as earth etc. as also their causes are unreal since they are not perceived differently from their causes, in that case, may it not be urged that owing to the non-existence of those (causes) there will arise the contingency of everything becoming unreal?

Shankara: No, for in all cases there is the experience of two awareness, viz. the awareness of reality and the awareness of unreality. That in relation to which the awareness does not change is real; that in relation to which it changes is unreal. ..... Of these two awarenesses the awareness of pot etc. is inconstant; and thus has it been show above. But the awareness of pot etc. is unreal because of inconstancy; but not so the object of the awareness of reality, because of its constancy.

In the above passage from his bhasya on 2.16 Shankara is saying "maya and pots etc is empirically-experienced but entirely false metaphysically", which refutes your erroneous claim that you made about him.

>If Maya is just illusion, there is no need for a two level epistemology. Physicalism does not have a two level epistemology but admits illusion.
Advaita has a two-tier ontology and not a two-tier epistemology. There is no established, unified pan-physicalist theory of error/illusion.
>In this case it is a realism towards objects in Maya that is true but ultimately untrue.
Wrong, I've already refuted that over and over, you are unconsciously or consciously (and sophistically) making a semantic drift from "experienced" into "true", Advaita DOESNT say Maya is "true but ultimately untrue" they say Maya is "experienced but untrue". "Experienced" isn't the same thing as truth or there would be no such thing as illusions or cognitive/perceptual errors and dreams would be just as true as waking life; which shows that "Experienced" isn't the same as "true".
>it is also contradictory and so not great metaphysis, but mystical work is by nature normally bad metaphysics.
It's not contradictory and it's one of the most refined metaphysical systems ever, you just keep getting tripped up by your own amateur mistakes and incorrect descriptions and assumptions

[Anonymous No.20108212]

>>20108206
The passage from Shankara's bhasya on Gita 2.16 can be verified at either of these links, refuting the erroneous the claim that he says maya is metaphysically or ontologically real.

http://michaelsudduth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Srimad-Bhagavad-Gita-Shankara-Bhashya-English.pdf

https://www.rarebooksocietyofindia.org/book_archive/196174216674_10152992577146675.pdf

[Anonymous No.20108240]

This one debunks Buddhism and his fallacies and contradictions pretty good in my opinion.

[Anonymous No.20108306]

>>20108240

He looks like the usual atheist tard who fucking loves buddhism and cant deal with his mental ramblings about social constructs lol

>I also related that to my own experience of various Buddhist meditation practices. To give a concrete example: in 2008, I participated in an insight meditation retreat for scientists and clinical researchers at the Insight Meditation Society, led by Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. They have a standard seven-day retreat format, which is a progression into an acquaintance with Burmese Vipassana insight meditation practice in the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw.

>I was very excited to go on the retreat. And it was a very intense and joyous and uplifting experience — almost in a way that was a little too joyous and uplifting. So, it made me sort of suspicious. At the retreat, there were, many people I knew who were scientists, clinicians, philosophers, grad students, postdocs, and professors, and we were all practicing together. So, there was this very intense group atmosphere. And the idea was that we were embarking on an investigation of the mind that was stripped of dogma. In scientific terms, you could say it was a method of inner observation and introspection that was rigorous and rational and scientific. This was very compelling to me.

>But, all along the way, during the retreat, there was this little voice off to the side — my skeptical philosopher voice, which said, “You know, this isn’t really about seeing things as they are. This is about learning to sculpt your experience in a certain way. You’re being given certain concepts, like impermanence and moment-to-moment arising and you’re using them to attend to your experience in a certain way, and you’re accentuating things in your experience, and you’re not speaking — because it’s a silent retreat — so you’re internalizing these instructions and concepts in a powerful way. And you know that everybody else is doing this. And this is kind of a collective social construction that we’re all reinforcing for each other. It’s as much about creating a certain mode of experience as it is about revealing anything pre-existently there.”

>So, I started to think about that and it led me to think that things aren’t as advertised. Not false advertising, but just that people are presenting things as being a certain way, when careful examination and scrutiny shows that’s not the only way of thinking about them. That led me into reading a lot about religious practice and ritual and the social aspects of religion. And I realized that a meditation retreat is a religious event. The silence, the rituals, the sculpted practices — how you walk into the room, how you acknowledge or don’t acknowledge others — the discourse you learn, the interviews you have with the teachers. All of this is a social, ritualistic construction that shapes people’s inner lives.

https://www.lionsroar.com/evan-thompson-not-buddhist/

Atheism was a huge mistake.

[Anonymous No.20108316]

>>20108306
lol yeah like clockwork, it's exactly that 2 questions later holy shit
>On the personal side, it has to do with my own upbringing. I was a kid in the 1970s. I was raised in an alternative spiritual-slash-educational community that was founded by my parents, William Irwin Thompson and Gail Thompson. My dad had been a university professor. He quit the university in the early 1970s because he felt that the universities were not providing the kind of knowledge and worldview that the world needed in order to survive looming crises of energy and environment. So, he created an alternative institution called the Lindisfarne Association. It was a commune in 1970s fashion. It also had scholars and scientists and artists and activists and religious, spiritual teachers flowing through it for conferences and living in the community. So, I grew up around teachers from different religious and spiritual traditions. Including many Zen Buddhists and Tibetan Buddhists. So, I became acquainted with Buddhism very early. I was very attracted to in some ways, but also uncomfortable with it in other ways. So, it’s kind of been an issue for me, since my childhood, to figure out my relationship to Buddhism.

>For a certain phase of my life, I tried to be a Buddhist. I would go on meditation retreats. I tried to become a member of different sanghas in different cities that I lived in. But I always came up against something that was increasingly important to me as a philosopher, which was the recognition of the diversity of intellectual, philosophical traditions and the importance of their interaction, without shutting down a conversation by affirming allegiance to one. And this gets articulated in my book, under the heading of “cosmopolitanism.”

Atheists are already lost when they encounter hinduism-mahayana-vajrayana and the step to buddhism is impossible for them. Atheists are only good are consuming mass produced goods, that they mas produce themselves.

[Anonymous No.20108321]

>>20108306
Theist cope.

[Anonymous No.20108404]

>>20108321
How about you a cope a feel of deez nuts, fedoraboy

[Anonymous No.20108469]

I asked Kastrup what is meant by the world being made out of mindstuff instead of physical stuff, but he didn't really answer

[Anonymous No.20108473]

from the book: he was doomed from the beginning lol.

My first year at Amherst was a challenge. I had no experience relating to people my own age (or near my own age). I hated the fraternity scene and weekend parties you couldn’t hide from because the library closed at 5 p.m. on Saturdays. Fortunately, one of my roommates turned out to be bookish, while having better social skills. He introduced me to a student who lived downstairs and planned to major in philosophy, and during the orientation week I met the only other sixteen-year-old there, a kind and brilliant person. We dubbed ourselves the Gang of Four and spent our time arguing about philosophy and politics. My roommate—an avid reader of Marx and Engels—labeled me a “nonaligned mystic.” Although I’d grown up in a heady intellectual place, there were plenty of ideas I hadn’t been exposed to, and my friends challenged me on everything. By the first year’s end, I was hungry for something philosophically rigorous but also spiritual.

I found what I was looking for the next year in Thurman’s Buddhism courses. I took his Buddhist Scriptures course in the fall, but it was his Topics in Indian Philosophy course in the spring that really grabbed me. We read translations of the Buddhist philosophers Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and Candrakīrti, as well as writings by contemporary philosophers, such as Bimal Krishna Matilal. We also read Thurman’s soon-to-be-published translation of a major work by the Tibetan philosopher Tsong Khapa, The Essence of True Eloquence. 4 This work examines some of the most difficult and subtle points of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. Tsong Khapa defends the Prāsaṇ gika Madhyamaka viewpoint, according to which all phenomena lack defining characteristics, even conventionally, and only negative (reductio ad absurdum ) arguments, rather than positive reasoning (syllogisms), should be used to establish that phenomena are empty of any inherent nature. By making these Indian and Tibetan philosophers interlocutors with European thinkers, such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, Thurman presented philosophy as a project of critical reason and human transformation beyond the geographies of East and West. That vision of philosophy—as a transformative path of rational liberation with a global heritage—is how I’ve thought about philosophy ever since.

[Anonymous No.20108482]

So the guy never read the pali canon once. he directly went on to abidharmma and mahayana, because like any atheist, he prefers exotic mental masturbations or practicing the path


From the Buddhist side, we can enter into this circulation from different philosophical perspectives. In the first part of The Embodied Mind, we rely mainly on the scholastic philosophy known as Abhidharma. The Abhidharma philosophers—notably, Vasubandhu (ca. fourth to fifth centuries CE)—analyze everything into patterns of relationships among elementary processes (called dharmas ). Anything that appears to be an independent entity with its own causal power is analyzed into processes that arise in dependence upon conditions. Already, from this perspective, any easy naturalism that takes the mind to be the brain won’t work. For the Abhidharma, what we call the “mind” is a collection of interactive processes, some physical and some mental, that arise together with what we call the “object” of cognition. In cognitive science language, what we call the “mind” is a collection of interactive processes that span and interconnect the brain, the rest of the body, and the environment, and what we call the “object” of cognition is defined by these interactive processes. 35

In the second part of The Embodied Mind, we rely on the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) tradition inaugurated by the philosopher Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE). 36 Its central idea is that all things are “empty.” “Emptiness” means that things lack their own independent being and independent natures. The existence of anything always involves dependence relations. Phenomena depend on causes and conditions, and they depend on their parts. In addition, Mādhyamikas (the followers of Madhyamaka) emphasize conceptual dependence. They argue that all phenomena depend on concepts, on how the mind conceptualizes things. For example, whether something counts as a cause, or as a part or a whole, depends on how we conceptually frame things. Thus, conceptual dependence subsumes causal dependence and whole-part dependence. According to Madhyamaka, nothing has its own intrinsic nature or intrinsic identity, entirely “from its own side.” Something’s nature or identity depends on how it’s picked out and identified via a conceptual system. More precisely, to say that an object is concept-dependent means that it depends on a conceptualizing mind, on a basis for applying the concept, and on a term for the concept in language. Mādhyamikas argue that knowable phenomena are concept-dependent in this technical sense. This implies that it doesn’t make sense to think of knowledge as grasping how the world is in itself apart from the mind.

[Anonymous No.20108489]

>>20108306
>and cant deal with his mental ramblings about social constructs lol
He is correctly noting in the part you quoted that Buddhist meditation practices are not seeing things as they are, but you are just encouraged to apply a model accepted a priori to your own experience and to only find things in your experience that confirm to that model, while downplaying and ignoring things that contradict it. It's a careful insight that many Buddhists fail to reach.

[Anonymous No.20109488]

Bump

[Anonymous No.20110979]

>>20107164
Not that anon but I am coming around to this view, what Neoplatonists should I read besides Plotinus?

[Anonymous No.20111112]

>>20110979
Uzdavinys.

[Anonymous No.20111375]

>>20104324
WHERE IS MATTER OP,?? Let me tell ya the kastrupian approach.
This words are really just pixels hitting your retina coming from the screen in front of your flesh?
Or that electronic manmade (mammal three brain being) device resting in the outer part of the dissociative boundary of your personal individual mind (aka your skin) in the vast sea of universal consciousness is being the representation created by You in space and time of the will? Reading THIS is all there is. NOW. Do you have an internal monologue? Are you cold or hot? You were breathing all this time?

[Anonymous No.20111957]

>>20111112
Bless you

[Anonymous No.20112007]

>>20110979
Dugin