And these people make more money in leading one retreat than you do in a year. Or ten years.Unfortunately, in many cases (though by no means all), it becomes a pseudo-spirituality (or ersatz religion) that is just a form of materialism by another name. — Apollodorus
Meh. Those folks mastered the art of humility.Your opinions are not supported by the texts. You will never find Socrates boasting of anything. — Wayfarer
George Lucas set the precedent.
“Fear is the path to the dark side … fear leads to anger … anger leads to hate … hate leads to suffering.”
Not just interpreted, but this is how the "spiritually advanced" so often behave.From the egological point of view, the idea of a 'superior being' is always interpreted as a claim, and a threat, or as a power-structure. No doubt religious institutions have exploited this dynamic, as do political organisations and leaders.
God can incarnate in all kinds of forms. The incarnation that Christians prefer is just one of many.But it ought not to be forgottten that in the Christian faith, the higher being manifested as a lowly indigent, in the person of Jesus, subject to all manner of insults and punishment by death.
Why would you need to demonstrate it?You mean what if these forms of personal conviction really are higher knowledge of reality? My question is how that could ever be demonstrated or known to be true. How could you ever demonstrate that you know that to be true as opposed to believing it to be true? — Janus
So what are you? The arbiter of other people's reality?but merely that they should be honest to both themselves and others and admit that it is a question of faith not knowledge (in the sense of being 'knowledge that' or propositional knowledge at least).
I think discipleship is for those who don't have the capacity/(ies) to inquire and think for themselves and practice in their own way (s); it's valid enough for them, but won't suit a freethinker. — Janus
evertheless if you practice it - and really Zen meditation is neither easy nor entertaining and very easy NOT to do - then those insights can become integrated into your outlook. Through that you can begin to understand the meaning of those teachings in a kind of embodied way. — Wayfarer
People have always directly or indirectly managed their emotions through music (and this is its adaptive utility). And via managing their emotions, their worldview. — baker
These things are culturally specific, though.Yes. I would have thought human emotional connection to sound and beat helped to build our original impulses. Not hard to see how sounds of nature, bird song and animal calls (representations of threats and pleasures) would have led to music which allowed us to intensify our sense of the numinous, hence chants, sacred song and hymns. — Tom Storm
As interpreted by which conductor?And Mahler.
It's only for the select few. So you have nothing to fear
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it ... For many are called, but few are chosen ... (Matt 7:14; 22:14) — Apollodorus
And these people make more money in leading one retreat than you do in a year. Or ten years.
Not negligible. — baker
So God created mostly scrap?? In his infinite goodness and wisdom, he chose that most of his creation should go to waste?? — baker
I think a lot of philosophy of mind has been influenced by that - talk of ‘consciousness’ always seems to me to carry an echo of the Sanskrit ‘citta’. Also enactivism and the ‘embodied cognition’ movement has some Eastern influences. All part of life’s rich tapestry. — Wayfarer
The scholars of modern yoga Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg comment that the globalisation of yoga has radically changed the nature and role of the guru. The medieval relationship between guru and shishya was one-to-one, well-understood in traditional Hindu society, based on trust developed over many years of instruction. The modern situation may bring the celebrity yoga teacher into close contact with strangers, anywhere in the world, in "milieus where the religious affiliations, function, status, and role of the guru may not be well understood" …
The present cultural landscape is bleak: mainline religions torn between their liberal and conservative wings; a snobbishly secular intelligentsia; an alternately cynical or naively credulous media; and a mass of neo-pagan cults and superstitions seething beneath the surface.
*Paglia is five years older than meThe religious impulse of the sixties must be rescued from he wreckage and redeemed. The exposure to Hinduism and Buddhism that my generation* had to get haphazardly from contemporary literature and music should be formalized and standardized for basic education. What students need to negotiate their way through the New Age fog is scholarly knowledge of ancient and medieval history, from early pagan nature cults through the embattled consolidation of Christian theology. Teaching religion as culture rather than as morality also gives students the intellectual freedom to find the ethical principles at the heart of every religion.
We are children of the State to whom we owe obedience. Or the State beats it into us. — baker
Rumor has it that an enlightened person could, in fact, step in front of a semi-trailer, but the semi-trailer's engine would fail or its brakes malfunction and block just in time for the semi-trailer to stop before it would hit the enlightened person. — baker
Why would you need to demonstrate it?
If one had truly come to a spiritual attaiment, that would be the one knowledge, the one attainment that one would not feel the need to demonstrate to others. — baker
Yet freethinking won't necessarily stop you from falling into an abyss, or save you from it.
Freethinking is no guarantee for success, in any field of endeavor. — baker
Sure, a lot of it turned out to be bullshit - I never did the Transcendental Meditation training, although I was taught a similar technique elsewhere - but I was embarrassed by the ‘yogic flying’ fiasco that came out of their so-called 'University'. The first Ashram I spent time at was later exposed as one of the worst instances of child abuse in the Australian Royal Commission into that sorry history. So I’m very well aware of the scams, the failures, the fake gurus. But nevertheless, I learned something through that encounter which I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. — Wayfarer
Or maybe 'examination' of life is really just a hidden attempt to control it to alleviate your irrational doubts towards it. — hope
desire to live in harmony with a higher reality and to be your true self. — Apollodorus
You don't need 'examination' for that. Only surrender. — hope
But the point I started out trying to make was the emphasis on 'spiritual practice' or sadhana, in those Eastern disciplines. It is always tied to that, as distinct from abstract reasoning about purported entities. — Wayfarer
we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever, that we may be dear to ourselves and to the gods both during our sojourn here and when we receive our reward, as the victors in the games go about to gather in theirs. And thus both here and in that journey of a thousand years, whereof I have told you, we shall fare well (Rep. 621c-d).
Eh?Which is all the more reason to suspect that he did not arrive at his certainty about those religious ideas by those same rational arguments with which he's trying to persuade thinking people.
— baker
Are you practicing your Buddhist sophistry, sorry, debating, skills on us? — Apollodorus
I'm saying that it is not at all likely that he arrived at his certainty about those religious ideas by those same rational arguments with which he's trying to persuade thinking people.Logic was just emerging and every system of rational thought is based on the elements available in the current culture of the time. Plato simply made use of what he had at his disposal. What would you have liked him to do, invent everything from scratch?
Thank you for the summary! However,The Forms are a type of universals. First, in Greek religion, the Gods were personifications of natural phenomena, states of mind, human occupations, moral values, etc., that served as a form of universals that enabled Greeks to organize and make sense of the world they lived in.
Second, the Greek word for Form, eidos, means “form”, “kind”, “species”. So, it makes sense to speak of a particular x as being a form or kind of a universal X.
Third, Plato follows the reductivist tendency already found in Greek philosophy, and in natural science in general, that sought to reduce the number of fundamental principles of explanation to the absolute minimum, hence the “first principle” or arche of the earliest Greek philosophers.
So, the Forms are consistent with Plato’s explanatory framework which is hierarchical.
Fourth, it is an undeniable fact that all experience, for example, visual perception, can be reduced to fundamental elements such as number, size, shape, color, distance, etc. that constitute a form of natural universals.
Fifth, it is a common feature of the Greek language as spoken at Plato’s time to form abstract nouns by adding the definite article to the neuter adjective. Thus the adjective “good”, agathos, which is agathon in the neuter, becomes the abstract noun “the good”, to agathon. This enables the Greek philosopher to speak of “the Good”, “the Beautiful”, or “the True”. Plato was making philosophy and logic for Greeks, not for non-Greek speaking people.
Sixth, eidos comes from the verb eido, “I see” and literally means “the seen”, “that which is seen”. This reflects the fact that for Greeks in general and for Plato in particular, to know was to see, thus knowledge or wisdom being a form of mental looking or seeing. Which is why in Plato, invisible realities are seen with the “eye of the soul”.
So, when Socrates talks to Meno or Simmias about Forms, it makes perfect sense to them.
But just like ordinary religious people nowadays, Plato et al. didn't arrive at their certainties by doing concentration and meditation techniques, did they?No one says that we should. But if we are trying to reconstruct what Socrates meant by examined life, etc., we need to look into known states of consciousness that are in agreement with Socrates' statements in the Phaedo and elsewhere.
It seems unquestionable that certain concentration and meditation techniques lead to an experience of peace and calm followed by joy, clarity, and what has been described as something akin to “love”, as well as experiences of "light."
And Beethoven said God inspired his music. I wouldn't make too much of such declarations; I see them primarily as culturally specific way of professing humility, gratitude, justification for making art.Socrates relates that he had dreams in which he was ordered to write poems to his master Apollo (Phaedo 60d-e). People have precognitive dreams. How does science explain this?
What I mean to say is that the benefits of meditation don't have any utility beyond themselves. If you are practicing for some advantage or utilitarian reason, then 'you are doing it wrong'. — Wayfarer
So God created mostly scrap?? In his infinite goodness and wisdom, he chose that most of his creation should go to waste??
— baker
1. God can do as he pleases. — Apollodorus
the West has modernized, westernized, commercialized, and "despiritualized" India. — Apollodorus
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